Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

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.”

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 .”