Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

“I’m sure it was nothing compared to the emotional burden of living day in and day out with a child who has these particular health problems,” Ramirez said, and beside me, Charlotte lifted her gaze to his. The lawyer smiled sympathetically at her. “I mean, it must be quite challenging.” He leaned forward, frowning a little. “I don’t know much about-what’s it called? Osteo…”

“Osteogenesis imperfecta,” Charlotte said softly.

“How many breaks has Willow had?”

“Fifty-two,” you said. “And did you know that the only bone that hasn’t been broken by a person in a skiing accident yet is one in the inner ear?”

“I did not,” Ramirez said, taken aback. “She’s something else, huh?”

I shrugged. You were Willow, pure and simple. There was nobody else like you. I knew it the moment I first held you, wrapped in foam so that you wouldn’t get hurt in my arms: your soul was stronger than your body, and in spite of what the doctors told me over and over, I always believed that was the reason for the breaks. What ordinary skeleton could contain a heart as big as the whole world?

Marin Gates cleared her throat. “How was Willow conceived?”

“Ugh,” Amelia said-until then, I’d forgotten she was with us-“that’s totally gross.” I shook my head at her, a warning.

“We had a hard time,” Charlotte said. “We were about to try in vitro when I found out I was pregnant.”

“Grosser,” Amelia said.

“Amelia!” I passed you over to your mother and pulled your sister up by the hand. “You can wait outside,” I said under my breath.

The secretary looked at us as we entered the waiting room again, but she didn’t say anything. “What are you going to talk about next?” Amelia challenged. “Your personal experience with hemorrhoids?”

“That’s enough,” I said, trying hard not to lose my temper in front of the secretary. “We’ll be out soon.”

While I headed back down the hall, I heard the secretary’s high heels clicking as she walked toward Amelia. “Want a cup of cocoa?” she asked.

When I entered the conference room again, Charlotte was still talking. “…but I was thirty-eight years old,” she said. “You know what they write on your charts, when you’re thirty-eight? ‘Geriatric pregnancy.’ I was worried about having a Down syndrome child-I never had even heard of OI.”

“Did you have amnio?”

“Amnio won’t tell you automatically that a fetus has OI; you’d have to be looking for it because it’s already shown up in your family. But Willow’s case was a spontaneous mutation. It wasn’t inherited.”

“So you didn’t know before Willow was born that she had OI?” Ramirez asked.

“We knew when Charlotte’s second ultrasound showed a bunch of broken bones,” I answered. “Look, are we done here? If you don’t want this case, I’m sure I can find-”

“Do you remember that weird thing at the first ultrasound?” Charlotte said, turning to me.

“What weird thing?” Ramirez asked.

“The tech thought the picture of the brain looked too clear.”

“There’s no such thing as too clear,” I said.

Ramirez and his associate exchanged a glance. “And what did your OB say?”

“Nothing.” Charlotte shrugged. “No one even mentioned OI until we did another ultrasound at twenty-seven weeks, and saw all the fractures.”

Ramirez turned to Marin Gates. “See if it’s ever diagnosed in utero that early,” he ordered, and then he turned back to Charlotte. “Would you be willing to release your medical records to us? We’ll have to do some research on whether or not you have a cause of action-”

“I thought we didn’t have a lawsuit,” I said.

“You might, Officer O’Keefe.” Robert Ramirez looked at you as if he was memorizing your features. “Just not the one you thought.”

Twelve years ago I was a senior in college, going nowhere fast, when I sat down at the kitchen table and had a talk with my mother (more on that later). “I don’t know what I want to be,” I said.

This was hugely ironic for me, because I didn’t really know what I had been, either. Since I was five, I’ve known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one’s own origins.

“What do you like to do?” my mother had asked, taking a sip of her coffee. She took it black; I took mine light and sweet. It was one of thousands of discrepancies between us that always led to unspoken questions: Had my birth mother taken her coffee light and sweet, too? Did she have my blue eyes, my high cheekbones, my left-handedness?

“I like to read,” I said, and then I rolled my eyes. “This is stupid.”

“And you like to argue.”

I smirked at her.

“Reading. Arguing. Honey,” my mother said, brightening, “you were meant to be a lawyer.”

Fast-forward nine years: I’d been called back to the doctor’s office because of an abnormal Pap smear. While I was waiting for the gynecologist to come in, the life I didn’t have flashed before my eyes: the kids I’d put off having because I was too busy in law school and building my career; the men I hadn’t dated because I wanted to make law review instead; the house in the country I didn’t buy because I worked such long hours I never would have been able to enjoy that expansive teak deck, that mountain view. “Let’s go over your family medical history,” my doctor said, and I gave my standard answer: “I’m adopted; I don’t know my family medical history.”

Even though I turned out to be fine-the abnormal results were a lab error-I think that was the day I decided to search for my birth parents.

I know what you’re thinking: wasn’t I happy with my adoptive parents? Well, the answer was yes-which is why I hadn’t even entertained the thought of searching until I was thirty-one. I’d always been happy and grateful that I got to grow up with my family; I didn’t need or want a new one. And the very last thing I wanted to do was break their hearts by telling them I was mounting a search.

But even though I knew my whole life that my adoptive parents desperately wanted me, somewhere in my mind, I knew that my birth parents didn’t. My mom had given me the party line about them being too young and not ready to have a family-and logically I understood that-but emotionally, I felt like I’d been tossed aside. I guess I wanted to know why. So after a talk with my adoptive parents-one during which my mother cried the whole time she promised to help me-I tentatively waded into the search that I’d been toying with for the past six months.

Being adopted felt like reading a book that had the first chapter ripped out. You might be enjoying the plot and the characters, but you’d probably also like to read that first line, too. However, when you took the book back to the store to say that the first chapter was missing, they told you they couldn’t sell you a replacement copy that was intact. What if you read that first chapter and realized you hated the book, and posted a nasty review on Amazon? What if you hurt the author’s feelings? Better just to stick with your partial copy and enjoy the rest of the story.

Adoption records weren’t open-not even for someone like me, who knew how to pull strings legally. Which meant that every step was Herculean, and that there were far more failures than successes. I’d spent the first three months of my search paying a private investigator over six hundred dollars to tell me that he had turned up absolutely nothing. That, I figured, I could have done myself for free.

The problem was that my real job kept interfering.

As soon as we finished showing the O’Keefes out of the law office I rounded on my boss. “For the record? This kind of lawsuit is completely unpalatable to me,” I said.