Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

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.

“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.