Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

Flamingo tongues were eaten in ancient Rome as a delicacy.

In Kentucky, it’s illegal to carry ice cream in your back pocket.

“Hey, sugar,” the nurse said. She had a cloud of unnaturally yellow hair and wore a stethoscope with a monkey clipped to the side of it. She was carrying a small plastic tray with an IV needle, alcohol wipes, and two strips of white tape.

“Needles suck,” you said.

“Willow! Watch your language!”

“But suck isn’t a swear word. Vacuums suck.”

“Especially if you’re the one doing the housecleaning,” the nurse murmured, swabbing your arm. “Now, Willow, I’m going to count to three before I stick you. Ready? One…two!”

“Three,” you yelped. “You lied!”

“Sometimes it’s easier to not be expecting it,” the nurse said, but she was lifting the needle again. “That wasn’t a good one. Let’s give it another try-”

“No,” I interrupted. “Is there another nurse on the floor who can do this?”

“I’ve been putting in IVs for thirteen years-”

“But not in my daughter.”

Her face frosted over. “I’ll get my supervisor.”

She closed the door behind us. “But that was only the first stick,” you said.

I sank down beside you on the bed. “She was sneaky. I’m not taking any chances.”

Your fingers ruffled the pages of your book, as if you were reading Braille. One factoid jumped out at me: The safest year of life, statistically, is age ten.

You were halfway there.

The nice part about your being kept overnight in the hospital was that I didn’t have to worry whether you’d wind up there, courtesy of a slip in the tub or an arm hooked on the sleeve of your jacket. As soon as they had finished the first infusion and flushed the IV and you were sleeping deeply, I crept out of the darkened room and went to the bank of pay phones near the elevators so that I could call home.

“How is she?” Sean asked as soon as he picked up the phone.

“Bored. Fidgety. The usual. How’s Amelia?”

“She got an A on her math quiz and threw a fit when I told her she had to wash the dishes after dinner.”

I smiled. “The usual,” I repeated.

“Guess what we had for dinner?” Sean said. “Chicken cordon bleu, roasted potatoes, and stir-fried green beans.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “You can’t even boil an egg.”

“I didn’t say I cooked. The take-out counter at the grocery store was just particularly well stocked tonight.”

“Well, Willow and I had a culinary feast of tapioca pudding, chicken noodle soup, and red Jell-O.”

“I want to call her before I go to work tomorrow. What time will she get up?”

“Six, for the nurses’ shift change,” I said.

“I’ll set my alarm,” Sean answered.

“By the way, Dr. Rosenblad asked me about doing the surgery again.”

This was-no pun intended-a bone of contention for Sean and me. Your orthopedic surgeon wanted to rod your femurs after you were out of your spica cast, so that, even if there were future breaks, they wouldn’t displace. Rodding also prevented bowing, since OI bone grows spirally. As Dr. Rosenblad said, it was the best way to manage OI, since you can’t cure OI. But although I was gung ho about doing anything and everything that might save you some pain in the future, Sean looked at the here and now-and the fact that a surgery meant you’d be incapacitated once again. I could practically hear him digging in his heels. “Didn’t you print out some article about how rodding stunts growth in OI kids-”

“You’re thinking of the spinal rods,” I said. “Once they put them in to combat the scoliosis, Willow won’t get any taller. This is different. Dr. Rosenblad even said the rods have gotten so sophisticated, they’ll grow with her-they telescope out.”

“What if she doesn’t have any more femur breaks? Then she’s having the surgery for nothing.”

The chances of you not having another leg break were about as good as those of the sun not rising tomorrow morning. That was the other difference between Sean and me-I was the resident pessimist. “Do you really want to have to deal with another spica cast? If she winds up in one when she’s seven or ten or twelve, who’s going to be able to lift her then?”

Sean sighed. “She’s a kid, Charlotte. Shouldn’t she be able to run around for a while before you take that away again?”

“ I’m not taking anything away,” I said, stung. “The fact is, she’s going to fall. The fact is, she’s going to break. Don’t cast me as the villain, Sean, just because I’m trying to help her in the long run.”

There was a hesitation. “I know how hard it is,” he said. “I know how much you do for her.”

It was as close as he could come to alluding to the disastrous visit in the lawyer’s office. “I wasn’t complaining-”

“I never said you were. I’m just saying…we knew it wouldn’t be easy, right?”

Yes, we’d known that. But I guess I also hadn’t realized it would ever be quite this hard. “I have to go,” I said, and when Sean said he loved me, I pretended I had not heard.

I hung up and immediately dialed Piper. “What’s wrong with men?” I asked.

In the background, I could hear the water running, dishes clattering in the sink. “Is that a rhetorical question?” she said.

“Sean doesn’t want Willow to have rodding surgery.”

“Hang on. Aren’t you in Boston for pamidronate?”

“Yes, and Rosenblad brought it up today when we saw him,” I said. “He’s been urging us to do it for a year now, and Sean keeps putting it off, and Willow keeps breaking.”

“Even though she’ll be better off in the long run?”

“Even though.”

“Well,” Piper said, “then I have one word for you: Lysistrata . ”

I burst out laughing. “I’ve been sleeping with Willow on the living room couch for the past month. If I told Sean I was going to stop having sex with him, it would be a pretty empty threat.”

“There’s your answer, then,” Piper said. “Bring on the candles, oysters, negligee, the whole nine yards…and when he’s blissed out in a hedonistic coma, ask him again.” I heard a voice in the background. “Rob says that’ll work like a charm.”

“Thank him for the vote of confidence.”

“Hey, by the way, tell Willow that a person’s thumb is as long as his nose.”

“Really?” I wedged my hand up to my face to check. “She’ll love that.”

“Oh, shoot, that’s my call waiting. Why can’t babies get born at nine in the morning ?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?” I said.

“And we come full circle. Talk to you tomorrow, Char.”

After I hung up, I stared at the receiver for a long moment. She’ll be better off in the long run, Piper had said.

Did she believe that, unconditionally? Not just about a rodding surgery but about any action that a good mother would undertake?

I didn’t know if I could even muster the courage to sue for wrongful birth. Saying abstractly that there were some children who shouldn’t be born was hard enough, but this went one step further. This meant saying one particular child- my child-shouldn’t have been born. What kind of mother would face a judge and a jury, and announce that she wished her child had never existed?

Either the kind of mother who didn’t love her daughter at all…or the kind of mother who loved her daughter too much. The kind of mother who would say anything and everything if it meant you’d have a better life.

But even if I came to terms with that moral conundrum, the additional wrinkle here was that the person on the other end of the lawsuit was not a stranger-she was my best friend.