Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

I stuck my head out of the room to ask a technician if she had a blanket I might wrap around you and found Dr. Dewitt approaching with your X-rays. “Willow’s cold,” I said, and he whipped off his white coat and settled it over your shoulders as soon as he stepped into the room. “The good news,” he said, “is that Willow’s other break is healing nicely.”

What other break?

I didn’t realize I’d said it aloud until the doctor pointed to a spot on your upper arm. It was hard to see-the collagen defect left your bones milky-but sure enough, there was the ridge of callus that suggested a healing fracture.

I felt a stab of guilt. When had you hurt yourself, and how could I not have known?

“Looks like it’s about two weeks old,” Dr. Dewitt mused, and just like that, I remembered: one night, when I carried you to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I had nearly dropped you. Although you’d insisted you were fine, you had only been lying for my sake.

“I am amazed to report, Willow, that you’ve broken one of the bones that’s hardest to break in the human body-your shoulder blade.” He pointed to the second image on the light board, to a crack clear down the middle of the scapula. “It moves around so much, it’s hardly ever fractured on impact.”

“So what do we do?” I asked.

“Well, she’s already in a spica cast…Short of mummification, the best thing is probably going to be a sling. It’s going to hurt for a few days-but the alternative seems like cruel and unusual punishment.” He bandaged your arm up against your chest, like the broken wing of a bird. “That too tight?”

You looked up at him. “I broke my clavicle once. It hurt more. Did you know that clavicle means ‘little key’-not just because it looks like one but because it connects all the other bones in the chest?”

Dr. Dewitt’s jaw dropped. “Are you some kind of Doogie Howser prodigy?”

“She reads a lot,” I said, smiling.

“Scapula, sternum, and xiphoid,” you added. “I can spell them, too.”

“Damn,” the doctor said softly, and then he blushed. “I mean, darn .” His gaze met mine over your head. “She’s the first OI patient I’ve had. It must be pretty wild.”

“Yes,” I said. “Wild.”

“Well, Willow, if you want to come work here as an ortho resident, there’s a white coat with your name on it.” He nodded at me. “And if you ever need someone to talk to…” He took a business card out of his breast pocket.

I tucked it into my back pocket, embarrassed. This probably wasn’t goodwill as much as it was preservation for Willow-the doctor had evidence of my own incompetence, two breaks up there in black and white. I pretended to be busy rummaging for something in my purse, but really, I was just waiting for him to leave. I heard him offer you a lollipop, say good-bye.

How could I claim to know what was best for you, what you deserved, when at any moment I might be thrown a curveball-and learn that I hadn’t protected you as well as I should have? Was I considering this lawsuit because of you, or to atone for all the things I’d done wrong up to this point?

Like wishing for a baby. Each month when I’d realized that Sean and I had again not conceived, I used to strip and stand in the shower with the water streaming down my face, praying to God; praying to get pregnant, no matter what.

I hoisted you into my arms-my left hip, since it was your right shoulder that had broken-and walked out of the examination room. The doctor’s card was burning a hole in my back pocket. I was so distracted, in fact, that I nearly ran over a little girl who was walking in the door of the hospital just as we were walking out. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” I said, and backed up. She was about your age, and she held on to her mother’s hand. She wore a pink tutu and mud boots with frog faces on the toes. Her head was completely bald.

You did the one thing you hated most when it happened to you: you stared.

The little girl stared back.

You’d learned early on that strangers would stare at a girl in a wheelchair. I’d taught you to smile at them, to say hello, so that they’d realize you were a person and not just some curiosity of nature. Amelia was your fiercest protector-if she saw a kid gawking at you, she’d walk right up and tell him that was what would happen if he didn’t clean his room or eat his vegetables. Once or twice, she’d made a child burst into tears, and I almost didn’t reprimand her because it made you smile and sit up straighter in your wheelchair, instead of trying to be invisible.

But this was different; this was an equal match.

I squeezed your waist. “Willow,” I chided.

The girl’s mother looked up at me. A thousand words passed between us, although neither of us spoke. She nodded at me, and I nodded back.

You and I walked out of the hospital into a late spring day that smelled of cinnamon and asphalt. You squinted, tried to raise your arm to shield your eyes, and remembered that it was bound tight against your body. “That girl, Mommy,” you said. “Why did she look like that?”

“Because she’s sick, and that’s what happens when she takes her medicine.”

You considered this for a moment. “I’m so lucky…my medicine lets me have hair.”

I was careful not to cry around you, but this time I could not help it. Here you were, with three out of four extremities broken. Here you were, with a healing fracture I hadn’t even known occurred. Here you were, period. “Yes, we’re lucky,” I said.

You put your hand against my cheek. “It’s okay, Mom,” you said. And just as I’d done for you in the ER, you patted my back, the very same spot you’d broken in your own body.

“Stop, goddammit!” I yelled as I sprinted across the empty park, holding the can of spray paint. The kid still had a lead on me, not to mention the benefit of being thirty years younger, but I wasn’t going to let him get away. Not even if it killed me, which, judging from the stitch in my side, it just might.

It had been one of those unseasonably warm spring days that made me remember what it felt like to be a kid, listening to the slap of girls’ flip-flops as they walked past you at the town pool. I admit, during my lunch break, I’d put on some running shorts and taken a quick dip. We wouldn’t be swimming for a while-out of solidarity with you, since you couldn’t go into a pool until you were out of your spica cast. There was nothing you wanted to do more than swim-something you’d never really learned to do because of various breaks. Even after Charlotte had discovered fiberglass casts-which were waterproof and wicked expensive-you somehow managed to miss the swim-lesson season for one reason or another. When Amelia was being a particularly nasty preadolescent, she’d lord over you the fact that she was headed to a pool party or out to the beach. Then you’d spend the whole day sulking or, in one memorable case, getting on the Internet and submitting a bid request for an in-ground pool-something we had neither the land nor the money for. Sometimes I thought you were obsessed with water-frozen in the winter or chlorinated in the summer; all you wanted was exactly what you couldn’t have.

Sort of like the rest of us, I guess.

Now, my hair was still wet; I smelled of chlorine-and I was trying to figure out how I could mask that from you when I got home. The car win dows were rolled down as I cruised by the local park, where a Little League game had recently broken up. And then I noticed a kid spray-painting graffiti on the dugout in broad daylight.

I don’t know what frustrated me more-the fact that this boy was defacing public property or the fact that he was doing it right under my nose, without even the pretense of hiding. I parked far away and sneaked up behind him. “Hey,” I called. “You want to tell me what you’re doing?”