Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

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.

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.

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 .