Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

You win some, you lose some.

Looking at Charlotte O’Keefe, who was sitting in my office with her cell phone clutched in her hands, I was pretty sure which way this case was going to go. “Where’s Willow?” I asked.

“Physical therapy,” Charlotte said. “She’s there till eleven.”

“And the breaks? They’re healing well?”

“Fingers crossed,” Charlotte replied.

“You’re expecting a call?”

She looked down, as if she was surprised to find herself holding her phone. “Oh, no. I mean, I hope not. I just have to be available if Willow gets hurt.”

We smiled politely at each other. “Should we…wait a little longer for your husband?”

“Well,” she said, coloring. “He’s not going to be joining us.”

To be honest, when Charlotte had called me to set up a meeting and talk about representation, I’d been surprised. Sean O’Keefe had made his feelings pretty damn clear when he’d stormed out of Bob’s office. Her phone call indicated that he’d calmed down enough to pursue litigation, but now-looking at Charlotte-I was starting to get a sinking feeling. “But he does want to file a lawsuit, right?”

She shifted on her chair. “I don’t understand why I can’t do this on my own.”

“Besides the obvious answer-that your husband’s bound to find out sooner or later-there’s a legal reason. You and your husband are both responsible for the care and raising of Willow. Let’s say you hire a lawyer by yourself and settle with the doctor, and then you get hit by a car and die. Your husband can go back and sue the doctor on his own, because he wasn’t a party to your settlement and didn’t release the doctor from future liability. Because of this, any defendant is going to insist that any settlement that’s reached or judgment in a trial include both of the parents. Which means that, even if Sergeant O’Keefe doesn’t want to be part of this lawsuit, he’s going to be impleaded-that is, brought into the lawsuit-so that it won’t be litigated again in the future.”

Charlotte frowned. “I understand.”

“Is that going to be a problem?”

“No,” she said. “No, it’s not. But…we don’t have money to hire a lawyer. We’re barely scraping by as it is, with everything Willow needs. That’s why…that’s why I’m here today to talk about the lawsuit.”

Every plaintiff mill firm-Bob Ramirez included-began a case with a cost-benefit analysis. It’s what had taken us so long to contact the O’Keefes between meetings: I would review a claim with experts, I would do due diligence to ascertain other suits like this and what the payouts had been. Once I knew that the estimated settlement would at least cover the costs of our time and the experts’ fees, I’d call the prospective clients and tell them they had a valid complaint. “You don’t have to worry about attorney’s fees,” I now said smoothly. “That would become part of the settlement. However, realistically, you do need to know that most wrongful birth suits settle out of court for less money than a jury would award, because malpractice insurance companies don’t want the press. Of the cases that do go to court, seventy-five percent find in favor of the defendant. Your particular case, which hinges on a misread sonogram, might not sway the jury-sonograms don’t make the most convincing evidence at a trial. And there will be considerable public scrutiny. There always is, when someone brings a wrongful birth suit.”

She looked up at me. “You mean people will think I’m in it for the money.”

“Well,” I said simply. “Aren’t you?”

Charlotte’s eyes welled with tears. “I’m in it for Willow. I’m the one who brought her into this world, so it’s up to me to make sure that she suffers as little as possible. That doesn’t make me a monster.” She pressed her fingers to the corners of her eyes. “Or does it?”

I gritted my teeth and passed her a box of Kleenex. Well, wasn’t that the $64,000 question?

It was probable that, by the time this lawsuit got to court, you would be old enough to fully understand the ramifications of what your mother was doing-just like I had, one day, when I was told about my adoption. I knew what it was like to feel as if your own mom didn’t want you. In fact, I’d spent my whole childhood inventing excuses for her. Daydream 1: She was desperately in love with a boy who’d gotten her pregnant, and her family couldn’t bear the stain of shame, so they sent her to Switzerland and told everyone she was at boarding school when, instead, she was having me. Daydream 2: She was headed off to the Peace Corps to save the world when she found herself pregnant-and realized she had to put the needs of others above her own desire for a baby. Daydream 3: She was an actress, America’s sweetheart, who would lose her family-values mid-west audience if they learned that she was a single mom. Daydream 4: She and my father were poor, struggling dairy farmers who wanted their baby to have a better life than they could offer.

I figured there was one seminal moment when a woman realized what it meant to be a mother. For my birth mom, maybe it was when she passed me to a nurse and said good-bye. For the mother who’d raised me, it was when she sat me down at the kitchen table and told me that I had been adopted. For your mother, it was making the decision to file this lawsuit in spite of the public and private backlash. Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child.

“I wanted another baby so much,” Charlotte said quietly. “I wanted to experience that, with Sean. I wanted us to take her to the park and push her on the swings. I wanted to bake cookies with her and go to her school plays. I wanted to teach her how to ride a horse and water-ski. I wanted her to take care of me when I got old,” she said, looking up at me. “Not the other way around.”

I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I didn’t want to believe that a person who had brought a baby into this world would quit so easily when the going got tough. “I think most parents know there’s going to be some bad to go with the good,” I said evenly.

“I wasn’t naïve-I already had a daughter. I knew I’d take care of Willow when she was hurt. I knew I’d have to get up in the middle of the night when she had nightmares. But I didn’t know she was going to be hurt for weeks at a time, for years at a time. I didn’t know I’d be up with her every night. I didn’t know that she would never get better.”

I looked down, pretending to straighten some papers. What if the reason my mother had given me away was that I didn’t measure up to what she had hoped for? “What about Willow?” I said, bluntly playing devil’s advocate. “She’s a smart kid. How do you think she’ll handle her mother saying she should never have been born?”

Charlotte flinched. “She knows that’s not the truth,” she said. “I could never imagine my life without her in it.”

A red flag went up in my mind. “Stop right there. Don’t say that. You can’t even hint at it. If you file this lawsuit, Mrs. O’Keefe, you have to be able to swear-under oath-that if you’d known about your daughter’s illness earlier, if you’d been given the choice, you would have terminated the pregnancy.” I waited until her gaze met mine. “Is that going to be a problem?”

Her eyes slid away, focusing on something outside my window. “Can you miss a person you’ve never known?”

There was a knock at the door, and the receptionist popped her head in. “Sorry to interrupt, Marin,” Briony said, “but your eleven o’clock is here.”

“Eleven?” Charlotte said, jumping to her feet. “I’m late. Willow’s going to panic.” She grabbed her purse, slung it over her shoulder, and hurried out of my office.