My Sister's Keeper (31 page)

Taylor shakes his head. “Not really. Sometimes, though, I think about
my funeral. If people will say good things, you know, about me. If anyone will
cry.” He hesitates. “If anyone will even come.”

“I will,” Kate promises.

Taylor dips his head toward Kate's, and she sways closer, and I realize that
this is why I followed them. I knew this was what I would find, and like Brian,
I wanted one more picture of my daughter, one that I might worry between my
fingers like a piece of sea glass. Taylor lifts up the edges of her blue
hygienic mask and I know I should stop him, I know I have to, but I don't. This
much I want her to have.

When they kiss, it is beautiful: those alabaster heads bent together, smooth
as statues—an optical illusion, a mirror image that's folding into itself.

When Kate goes into the hospital for her stem cell transplant, she's an
emotional wreck. She is far less concerned with the runny fluid being infused
into her catheter than she is with the fact that Taylor hasn't called her in
three days, and has in fact not returned her calls either. “Did you have a
fight?” I ask, and she shakes her head. “Did he say he was going
somewhere? Maybe it was an emergency,” I say. “Maybe this has nothing
to do with you at all.”

“Maybe it does,” Kate argues.

“Then the best revenge is getting healthy enough to give him a piece of
your mind,” I point out. “I'll be right back.”

In the hallway, I approach Steph, a nurse who has just come on duty and
who's known Kate for years. The truth is, I am just as surprised about Taylor's
lack of communication as Kate is. He knew she was coming in here.

“Taylor Ambrose,” I ask Steph. “Has he been in today?”

She looks at me and blinks.

“Big kid, sweet. Hung up on my daughter,” I joke.

“Oh, Sara… I thought for sure someone would have told you,” Steph
says. “He died this morning.”

I don't tell Kate, not for a month. Not until the day Dr. Chance says Kate
is well enough to leave the hospital, until Kate has already convinced herself
she was better off without him. I cannot begin to tell you the words I use;
none of them are big enough to bear the weight behind them. I mention how I
went to Taylor's house and spoke to his mother; how she broke down in my arms
and said she'd wanted to call me, but there was a part of her that was so
jealous it swallowed all her speech. She told me that Taylor, who'd come home
from the prom walking on air, had walked into her bedroom in the middle of the
night, with a 105 degree fever. How maybe it was viral and maybe it was fungal
but he'd gone into respiratory distress and then cardiac arrest and after
thirty minutes of trying the doctors had to let him go.

I don't tell Kate something else Jenna Ambrose said—that afterward, she went
inside and stared at her son, who wasn't her son anymore. That she sat for five
whole hours, sure he was going to wake up. That even now she hears noise
overhead and thinks Taylor is moving around his room, and that the half-second
she is gifted before she remembers the truth is the only reason she gets up
each morning.

“Kate,” I say, “I'm so sorry.”

Kate's face crumples. “But I loved him,” she replies, as if this
should be enough.

“I know.”

“And you didn't tell me.”

“I couldn't. Not when I thought it might make you stop fighting back,
yourself.”

She closes her eyes and turns onto her side on the pillow, crying so hard
that the monitors she's still hooked to begin to beep and bring in the nursing
staff.

I reach for her. “Kate, honey, I did what was best for you.”

She refuses to look in my direction. “Don't talk to me,” she
murmurs. “You're good at that.”

Kate stops speaking to me for seven days and eleven hours. We come home from
the hospital; we go about our business of reverse isolation; we pick through
the motions because we have done it before. At night I lie in bed next to Brian
and wonder why he can sleep. I stare at the ceiling and think that I have lost
my daughter before she's even gone.

Then one day I walk by her bedroom and find her sitting on the floor with
photographs all around. There are, as I expect, the ones of her and Taylor that
we took before the prom—Kate dressed to the nines with that telltale surgical
mask covering her mouth. Taylor has drawn a lipstick smile on it, for the sake
of the photos, or so he said.

It had made Kate laugh. It seems impossible that this boy, who was so solid
a presence when the flash went off mere weeks ago, simply is not here anymore;
a pang goes through me, and immediately on its heels a single word: practice.

But there are other photos, too, from when Kate was younger. One of Kate and
Anna on the beach, crouched over a hermit crab. One of Kate dressed up like Mr.
Peanut for Halloween. One of Kate with cream cheese all over her face, holding
up two halves of a bagel like eyeglasses.

In another pile are her baby pictures—all taken when she was three, or
younger. Gap-toothed and grinning, backlit by a sloe-eyed sun, unaware of what
was to come. “I don't remember being her,” Kate says quietly, and
these first words make a bridge of glass, one that shifts beneath my feet as I
step into the room.

I put my hand beside hers, at the edge of one photo. Bent at a corner, it
shows Kate as a toddler being tossed into the air by Brian, her hair flying
behind her, her arms and legs starfish-splayed, certain beyond a doubt that
when she fell to earth again, there would be a safe landing, sure that she
deserved nothing less.

“She was beautiful,” Kate adds, and with her pinky she strokes the
glossy vivid cheek of the girl none of us ever got to know.

JESSE

THE SUMMER I WAS FOURTEEN my parents sent me to boot camp on a farm. It was
one of those action-adventures for troubled kids, you know, get up at four A.M.
to do the milking and how much trouble can you really get into? (The answer, if
you're interested: score pot off the ranch hands. Get stoned. Tip cows.)
Anyway, one day I was assigned to Moses Patrol, or that's what we called the
poor son of a bitch who pulled herding duty with the lambs. I had to follow
about a hundred sheep around a pasture that didn't have one goddamned tree to
provide even a sliver of shade.

To say a sheep is the dumbest fucking animal on earth is probably an
understatement. They get caught in fences. They get lost in four-foot-square
pens. They forget where to find their food, although it's been in the same
place for a thousand days straight. And they're not the little puffy darlings
you picture when you go to sleep, either. They stink. They bleat. They're
annoying as hell.

Anyway, the day I was stuck with the sheep, I had filched a copy of Tropic
of Cancer and I was folding down the pages that came closest to
good porn, when I heard someone scream. I was perfectly sure, mind you, that it
wasn't an animal, because I'd never heard anything like this in my life. I ran
toward the sound, sure I was going to find someone thrown from a horse with
their leg twisted like a pretzel or some yoho who'd emptied his revolver by
accident into his own guts. But lying on the side of the creek, with a bevy of
ewes in attendance, was a sheep giving birth.

I wasn't a vet or anything, but I knew enough to realize that when any
living creature makes a racket like that, things aren't going according to
plan. Sure enough, this poor sheep had two little hooves dangling out of her
privates. She lay on her side, panting. She rolled one flat black eye toward
me, then just gave up.

Well, nothing was dying on my patrol, if only because I knew that the Nazis
who ran the camp would make me bury the damn animal. So I shoved the other
sheep out of the way. I got down on my knees and grabbed the knotty slick
hooves and yanked while the ewe screamed like any mother whose child is ripped
away from her.

The lamb came out, its limbs folded like the parts of a Swiss Army knife.
Over its head was a silver sac that felt like the inside of your cheek when you
run your tongue around it. It wasn't breathing.

I sure as shit wasn't going to put my mouth over a sheep and do artificial
respiration, but I used my fingernails to rip apart the skin sac, to yank it
down from the neck of the lamb. And it turned out, that was all it needed. A
minute later it unbent its clothespin legs and started whickering for its
mother.

There were, I think, twenty lambs born during that summer session. Every
time I passed the pen I could pick mine out from a crowd. He looked like all
the others, except that he moved with a little more spring; he always seemed to
have the sun shining off the oil in its wool. And if you happened to get him
calm enough to look you in the eye, the pupils had gone milky white, a sure
sign that he'd walked on the other side long enough to remember what he was
missing.

I tell you this now because when Kate finally stirs in that hospital bed,
and opens her eyes, I know she's got one foot on the other side already, too.

“Oh my God,” Kate says weakly, when she sees me. “I wound up
in Hell after all.”

I lean forward in my chair and cross my arms. “Now, sis, you know I'm
not that easy to kill.” Getting up, I kiss her on the forehead, letting my
lips stay an extra second. How is it that mothers can read fever that way? I
can only read imminent loss. “How you doing?”

She smiles at me, but it's like a cartoon drawing when I've seen the real
thing hanging in the Louvre. “Peachy,” she says. “To what do I
owe the honor of your presence?”

Because you won't be here much longer, I think, but I do not tell her this.
“I was in the neighborhood. Plus there's a really hot nurse who works this
shift.”

This makes Kate laugh out loud. “God, Jess. I'm gonna miss you.”

She says it so easily that I think it surprises both of us. I sit down on
the edge of the bed and trace the little puckers in the thermal blanket.
“You know—” I begin a pep talk, but she puts her hand on my arm.

“Don't.” Then her eyes come alive, for just a moment. “Maybe
I'll get reincarnated.”

“Like as Marie Antoinette?”

“No, it's got to be something in the future. You think that's
crazy?”

“No,” I admit. “I think we probably all just keep running in
circles.”

“So what will you come back as, then?”

“Carrion.” She winces, and something beeps, and I panic. “You
want me to get someone?”

“No, you're fine,” Kate answers, and I'm sure she doesn't mean it
this way, but it pretty much makes me feel like I've swallowed lightning.

I suddenly remember an old game I used to play when I was nine or ten, and
was allowed to ride my bike until it got dark. I used to make little bets with
myself as I watched the sun getting lower and lower on the horizon: if I hold
my breath to twenty seconds, the night won't come. If I don't blink. If I stand
so still a fly lands on my cheek. Now, I find myself doing the same thing,
bargaining to keep Kate, even though that isn't the way it works.

“Are you afraid?” I blurt out. “Of dying?”

Kate turns to me, a smile sliding over her mouth. “I'll let you
know.” Then she closes her eyes. “I'm just gonna rest a second,”
she manages, and she is asleep again.

It's not fair, but Kate knows that. It doesn't take a whole long life to
realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get. I stand up, with that
lightning bolt branding the lining of my throat, which makes it impossible to
swallow, so everything gets backed up like a dammed river. I hurry out of
Kate's room and far enough down the hall where I won't disturb her, and then I
lift my fist and punch a hole in the thick white wall and still this isn't
enough.

BRIAN

HERE IS THE RECIPE TO BLOW SOMETHING UP: a Pyrex bowl; potassium
chloride—found at health food stores, as a salt substitute. A hydrometer.
Bleach. Take the bleach and pour it into the Pyrex, put it onto a stove burner.
Meanwhile, weigh out your potassium chloride and add to the bleach. Check it
with the hydrometer and boil until you get a reading of 1.3. Cool to room
temperature, and filter out the crystals that form. This is what you will save.

It's hard to be the one always waiting. I mean, there's something to be said
for the hero who charges off to battle, but when you get right down to it
there's a whole story in who's left behind.

I'm in what has to be the ugliest courtroom on the East Coast, sitting in
chairs until it's my turn, when suddenly my beeper goes off. I look at the
number, groan, and try to figure out what to do. I'm a witness later, but the
department needs me right now.

It takes a few talking heads but I get permission from the judge to remove
myself from the premises. I leave through the front door, and immediately I'm
assailed with questions and cameras and lights. It is everything I can do not
to punch these vultures, who want to rip apart the bleached bones of my family.

When I couldn't find Anna the morning of the hearing, I headed home. I
looked in all her usual haunts-the kitchen, the bedroom, the hammock out back-but
she wasn't there. As a last resort I climbed the garage stairs to the apartment
Jesse uses.

He wasn't home either, although by now this is hardly a surprise. There was
a time when Jesse disappointed me regularly; eventually, I told myself not to
expect anything from him, and as a result, it has gotten easier for me to take
what comes. I knocked on the door and yelled for Anna, for Jesse, but no one
answered. Although there was a key to this apartment on my own set, I stopped
short of letting myself inside. Turning on the stairs, I knocked over the red
recycling bin I personally empty every Tuesday, since God forbid Jesse can
remember to drag it out to the curb himself. A tenpin of beer bottles, lucent
green, tumbled out. An empty jug of laundry detergent, an olive jar, a gallon
container from orange juice.

I put everything back in, except for the orange juice container, which I've
told Jesse isn't recyclable and which he puts in the bin nonetheless every damn
week.

The difference between these fires and the other ones was that now the
stakes have been ratcheted up a notch. Instead of an abandoned warehouse or a
shack at the side of the water, it is an elementary school. This being summer,
no one was on the premises when the fire was started. But there's no question
in my mind it was due to unnatural causes.

When I get there, the engines are just loading up after salvage and
overhaul. Paulie comes over to me right away. “How's Kate?”

“She's okay,” I tell him, and I nod toward the mess. “What'd
you find?”

“He pretty much managed to gut the whole north side of the
facility,” Paulie says. “You doing a walk through?”

'Yeah."

The fire began in the teacher's lounge; the char patterns point like an
arrow to the origin. A collection of synthetic stuffing that hasn't burned
clean through is still visible; whoever set this was smart enough to light his
fire in the middle of a pile of couch cushions and stacks of paper. I can still
smell the accelerant; this time it was as simple as gasoline. Bits of glass
from the exploded Molotov cocktail litter the ashes.

I wander to the far side of the building, peer through a broken window. The
guys must have vented the fire here. “You think we'll catch this little
fuck, Cap?” asks Caesar, coming into the room. Still in his turnout gear,
with a smudge across his left cheek, he looks down at the debris in the fire
line. Then he bends down, and with his heavy glove, picks up a cigarette butt.
“Unbelievable. The secretary's desk melted down to a puddle, but a goddamn
tobacco stick survives.”

I take it out of his hands and turn it over in my palm. “That's because
it wasn't here when the fire started. Someone had a nice smoke while he watched
this, and then he walked away.” I tip it onto the side, to where the
yellow meets the filter, and read the brand.

Paulie sticks his head in the shattered window, looking for Caesar.
“We're heading back. Get on the truck.” Then he turns to me.
“Hey, just so you know, we didn't break this one.”

“I wasn't gonna make you pay for it, Paulie.”

“No, I mean, we vented the roof. This was already broken when we got
here.” He and Caesar leave, and a few moments later I hear the heavy drag
of the engine pulling away.

It could have been a stray baseball, or a Frisbee. But even in the
summertime, janitors monitor public property. A broken window is too much of a
hazard to be left alone; it would have been taped up or boarded.

Unless the same guy who started the fire knew where to bring in oxygen, so
that the flames would race through the wind tunnel created by that vacuum.

I look down at the cigarette in my hand, and crush it.

You need 56 grams of these reserved crystals. Mix with distilled water. Heat
to a boil and cool again, saving the crystals, pure potassium chlorate. Grind
these to the consistency of face powder, and heat gently to dry. Melt five
parts Vaseline with five parts wax. Dissolve in gasoline and pour this liquid
onto 90 parts potassium chlorate crystals in a plastic bowl. Knead. Allow the
gasoline to evaporate.

Mold into a cube and dip in wax to make it waterproof. This explosive
requires a blasting cap of at least a grade A3.

When Jesse opens the door to his apartment, I am waiting on the couch.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.

“What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” Jesse says. “Remember?”

“Do you? Or are you using this as a place to hide?”

He takes out a cigarette from a pack in his front pocket and lights up.
Merits. “I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Why aren't you
in court?”

“How come there's muriatic acid under your sink?” I ask.
“Considering that we don't have a pool?”

“Hello? Is this, like, the Inquisition?” He scowls. “I used
it when I was working with those tile layers last summer; you can clean up
grout with it. To tell you the truth I didn't even know I still had it.”

“Then you probably wouldn't know, Jess, that when you put it into a
bottle with a piece of aluminum foil with a rag stuffed into the top, it blows
up pretty damn well.”

He goes very still. “Are you accusing me of something? Because if you
are, just say it, you bastard.”

I get up from the couch. “Okay. I want to know if you scored the bottles
before you made the cocktails, so that they'd break easier. I want to know if
you realized how close that homeless guy was to dying when you set the
warehouse on fire for kicks.” Reaching behind me, I lift the empty Clorox
container from his recycle bin. “I want to know why the hell this is in
your trash, when you don't do your own laundry and God knows you don't clean,
yet there's an elementary school six miles from here that's been gutted with an
explosive made of bleach and brake fluid?” I have him by the shoulders
now, and although Jesse could break away if he really tried, he lets me shake
him until his head snaps back. “Jesus Christ, Jesse!”

He stares at me, his face blank. “Are you about done?”

I let him go and he backs away, teeth bared. “Then tell me I'm
wrong,” I challenge.

“I'll tell you more than that,” he yells. “I mean, I totally
understand that you've spent your life believing that everything that's wrong
in the universe all traces back to me, but news flash, Dad, this time you're
totally off base.”

Slowly, I take something out of my pocket and press it into Jesse's hand.
The Merit cigarette butt settles in the hollow of his palm. 'Then you shouldn't
have left your calling card."

There is a point when a structure fire is raging out of control that you
simply have to give it the distance to burn itself out. So you move back to
safety, to a hill out of the wind, and you watch the building eat itself alive.

Jesse's hand comes up, trembling, and the cigarette rolls to the floor at
our feet. He covers his face, presses his thumbs to the corners of his eyes.
“I couldn't save her.” The words are ripped from his center. He
hunches his shoulders, sliding backward into the body of a boy. “Who… who
did you tell?”

He is asking, I realize, whether the police will be coming after him.
Whether I have spoken to Sara about this.

He is asking to be punished.

So I do what I know will destroy him: I pull Jesse into my arms as he sobs.
His back is broader than mine. He stands a half-head taller than me. I don't remember
seeing him go from that five-year-old, who wasn't a genetic match, to the man
he is now, and I guess this is the problem. How does someone go from thinking
that if he cannot rescue, he must destroy? And do you blame him, or do you
blame the folks who should have told him otherwise?

I will make sure that my son's pyromania ends here and now, but I won't tell
the cops or the fire chief about this. Maybe that's nepotism, maybe it's
stupidity. Maybe it's because Jesse isn't all that different from me, choosing
fire as his medium, needing to know that he could command at least one
uncontrollable thing.

Jesse's breathing evens against me, like it used to when he was so small,
when I used to carry him upstairs after he'd fallen asleep in my lap. He used
to hit me over and over with questions: What's a two-inch hose for, a
one-inch? How come you wash the engines? Does the can man ever get to drive?
I realize that I cannot remember exactly when he stopped asking. But I do
remember feeling as if something had gone missing, as if the loss of a kid's
hero worship can ache like a phantom limb.

CAMPBELL

DOCTORS HAVE THIS THING about being subpoenaed: they let you know, with
every syllable of every word, that no moment of this testimony will make up for
the fact that while they were sitting on the witness stand under duress,
patients were waiting, people were dying. Frankly, it pisses me off. And before
I know it, I can't help myself, I am asking for a bathroom break, leaning down
to retie my shoe, gathering my thoughts and stuffing sentences with pregnant
pauses—whatever it takes to keep them cooling their heels just a few seconds
more.

Dr. Chance is no exception to the rule. From the onset he's anxious to
leave. He checks his watch so often you'd think he was about to miss a train.
The difference this time around is that Sara Fitzgerald is just as anxious to
get him out of the courtroom. Because the patient who is waiting, the person
who is dying, is Kate.

But beside me, Anna's body throws heat. I get up, continue my questioning.
Slowly. “Dr. Chance, were any of the treatments that involved donations
from Anna's body sure things'?”

“Nothing in cancer is a sure thing, Mr. Alexander.”

“Was that explained to the Fitzgeralds?”

“We carefully explain the risks of every procedure, because once you
begin treatments, you compromise other bodily systems. What we wind up doing
for one treatment successfully may come back to haunt you the next time
around.” He smiles at Sara. “That said, Kate's an incredible young
woman. She wasn't expected to live past age five, and here she is at
sixteen.”

“Thanks to her sister,” I point out.

Dr. Chance nods. “Not many patients have both the strength of body and
the good fortune to have a perfectly matched donor available to them.”

I stand up, my hands in my pockets. “Can you tell the Court how the
Fitzgeralds came to consult Providence Hospital's preimplantation genetic
diagnosis team to conceive Anna?”

“After their son was tested and found to be an unsuitable donor for
Kate, I told the Fitzgeralds about another family I'd worked with. They'd
tested all the patient's siblings, and none qualified, but then the mother got
pregnant during the course of treatment and that child happened to be a perfect
match.”

“Did you tell the Fitzgeralds to conceive a genetically programmed
child to serve as a donor for Kate?”

“Absolutely not,” Chance says, affronted. “I just explained
that even if none of the existing children was a match, that didn't mean that a
future child might not be.”

“Did you explain to the Fitzgeralds that this child, as a perfectly
genetically programmed match, would have to be available for all these
treatments for Kate throughout her life?”

“We were talking about a single cord blood treatment at the time,”
Dr. Chance says. “Subsequent donations came about because Kate didn't
respond to the first one. And because they offered more promising
results.”

“So if tomorrow scientists were to come up with a procedure that would
cure Kate's cancer if Anna only cut off her head and gave it to her sister,
would you recommend that?”

“Obviously not. I would never recommend a treatment that risked another
child's life.”

“Isn't that what you've done for the past thirteen years?”

His face tightens. “None of the treatments have caused significant
long-term harm to Anna.”

I take a piece of paper out of my briefcase and hand it to the judge, and
then to Dr. Chance. “Can you read the part that's marked?”

He puts on a pair of glasses and clears his throat. “I understand that
anesthesia involves potential risks. These risks may include, but are not
limited to: adverse drug reactions, sore throat, injury to teeth and dental
work, damage to vocal cords, respiratory problems, minor pain and discomfort,
loss of sensation, headaches, infection, allergic reaction, awareness during
general anesthesia, jaundice, bleeding, nerve injury, blood clot, heart attack,
brain damage, and even loss of bodily function or of life.”

“Are you familiar with this form, Doctor?”