Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

But you were. You did the funniest Paris Hilton impression I’d ever seen; you could sing the alphabet backward; your features were delicate, elfin, fairy-tale. Those brittle bones were the least important part of you.

Suddenly Charlotte folded. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No, honestly, my mouth shouldn’t be able to function unless my brain’s engaged.”

“I’m just exhausted,” Charlotte said. “I ought to call it a night.” When I started to get up off my stool, she shook her head. “Stay here, finish your beer.”

“Let me walk you out to the car-”

“I’m a big girl, Piper. Really. Just forget I even said anything.”

I nodded. And, stupid me, I did.

So there I was in the school library, one of the few places where I could pretend my life wasn’t totally ruled by your OI, when I stumbled across it: a photograph in a magazine of a woman who looked just like you. It was weird, like one of those FBI photos where they artificially age a kid who’s been kidnapped ten years, so that you might be able to recognize him on the street. There was your flyaway silk hair, your pointy chin, your bowed legs. I’d met other OI kids before and knew you all had similar features, but this was really ridiculous.

Even more weird was the fact that this lady was holding a baby, and was standing next to a giant. He had his arm around her and was grinning out of the photo with a really heinous overbite.

“Alma Dukins,” the text below it read, “is only 3'2''; her husband, Grady, is 6'4''.”

“Whatcha doing?” Emma said.

She was my best friend; we’d been best friends for, like, ever. After the whole Disney nightmare, when kids in school found out I’d been shipped off to a foster home overnight, she (a) didn’t treat me like a leper, and (b) threatened to deck anyone who did. Right now, she’d come up behind my chair and notched her chin over my shoulder. “Hey, that woman looks like your sister.”

I nodded. “She’s got OI, too. Maybe Wills was switched at birth.”

Emma sank into the empty chair beside me. “Is that her husband? My dad could totally fix his teeth.” She peered at the magazine. “God, how do they even do it?”

“That’s disgusting,” I said, although I had been wondering the same thing.

Emma blew a bubble with her gum. “I guess everyone’s the same height when you’re lying down doing the nasty,” she said. “I thought Willow couldn’t have kids.”

I kind of thought that, too. I guess no one had ever really discussed it with you, because you were only five, and believe me I didn’t want to think about anything as repulsive as this, but if you could break a bone coughing, how would you ever get a baby out of you, or a you-know-what in ?

I knew if I wanted rugrats, I’d be able to have them one day. If you wanted kids, though, it wouldn’t be easy, even if it was possible. It wasn’t fair, but then again, what was when it came to you?

You couldn’t skate. You couldn’t bike. You couldn’t ski. And even when you did play a game that was physical-like hide-and-seek-Mom used to insist that you get an extra count of twenty. I pretended to be bent out of shape by this so you wouldn’t feel like you were getting special treatment, but deep down I knew it was the right thing to do-you couldn’t get around as fast as I could, with your braces or crutches or wheelchair, and it took you longer to wiggle into a hiding spot. Amelia, wait up! you always said when we were walking somewhere, and I would, because I knew there were a million other ways I would leave you behind.

I would grow up, while you’d stay the size of a toddler.

I would go to college, move away from home, and not have to worry about things like whether I could reach the gas pump or the buttons on the ATM.

I’d maybe find a guy who didn’t think I was a total loser and get married and have kids and be able to carry them around without worrying that I’d get microfractures in my spine.

I read the finer print of the magazine article.

Alma Dukins, 34, gave birth on March 5, 2008, to a healthy baby girl. Dukins, who has osteogenesis imperfecta Type III, is 3'2'' tall and weighed 39 pounds before her pregnancy. She gained 19 pounds during her pregnancy and her daughter, Lulu, was delivered by C-section at 32 weeks, when Alma’s small body could not accommodate the enlarging uterus. She weighed four pounds, six ounces, and was 16½ inches long at birth.

You were at the stage when you played with dolls. Mom said I used to do that, too, although I only remember dismembering mine and cutting off all their hair. Sometimes I would catch Mom watching you wrap your fake baby’s arm in a cast, and it was like a storm cloud passed over her face-she was probably thinking that chances were you’d never have a real baby, mixed with feeling relief that you wouldn’t have to know what it was like to watch your own kid break a million bones, like she did.

But in spite of what my mother thought, here was proof that someone with OI could have a family. This Alma woman was Type III, like you. She didn’t walk like you could-she was wheelchair-bound. And yet she’d managed to find a husband, goofy smile and all, and have a baby of her own.

“You ought to show Willow,” Emma said. “Just take it. Who’s going to know?”

So I checked to see if the librarian was still on her computer, ordering clothes from Gap.com (we’d done our share of spying on her), and then I faked a coughing fit. I doubled over and tucked the magazine inside my jacket. I smiled weakly as the librarian glanced at me to make sure I wasn’t hacking out a lung on the floor or anything.

Emma expected me to keep the magazine for you, to show you or even Mom that one day you could grow up and get married and have a kid. But I had stolen it for a completely different reason. See, this year, you were starting kindergarten. And one day you’d be a seventh grader, like me. And you might be sitting in this library and come across this stupid magazine and see what I had seen when I looked at it: the space between Alma and her husband, that baby, too huge in her arms.

To me, this didn’t look like a happy family. It was a circus freak show, minus the big top. Why else would it be in a magazine? Normal families didn’t make the news.

In English class I asked to go to the bathroom. There, I tore the page out of the magazine and ripped the picture into the tiniest pieces I could. I flushed them down the toilet, the best I could do to protect you.

People think of the law as a virtual hallowed hall of justice, but the truth is that my job more closely resembles a bad sitcom. I once represented a woman who was carrying a frozen turkey out of her local Stop-n-Save grocery store the day before Thanksgiving, when the turkey slipped through the plastic bag and fractured her foot. She sued the Stop-n-Save, but we also included the company that made the plastic bags, and she walked away-without crutches, mind you-several hundred thousand dollars richer.

Then there was the case that involved a woman driving home at two a.m. on a back road at eighty miles per hour, who collided with a lost tractor trailer that had backed up across the road to turn around. She was killed instantly, and her husband wanted to sue the tractor-trailer company because they didn’t have lights along the side of the truck so that his wife could have seen it. We brought a wrongful death suit against the driver of the truck, citing loss of consortium-asking for millions to make up for the fact that the husband had lost his beloved wife’s company. Unfortunately, during the case, the defendant’s attorney uncovered the fact that my client’s wife had been on her way home from a rendezvous with her lover.