Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

That, I realized, was the reason that I hadn’t signed those damn papers. Like Charlotte, I was only thinking of you. I was thinking of the moment you realized that I wasn’t a knight in shining armor. I knew it would happen eventually-that’s what growing up is all about. But I didn’t want to rush it. I wanted to be your champion for as long as I could keep you believing in me.

“If Willow’s opinion is the only one that counts,” I said, “how are you going to explain to her what you’re doing? I mean, you want to lie on the witness stand-say you would have aborted her-that’s up to you. But to Willow, it might sound a hell of a lot like the truth.”

Tears sprang to Charlotte’s eyes. “She’s smart. She’ll understand that it doesn’t matter what it looks like on the surface. She’ll know deep down that I love her.”

It was a catch-22. My refusal to sign those papers didn’t mean Charlotte wouldn’t try to proceed without me. If I refused to sign those papers, the rift between the two of us would hurt you, too. But what if Charlotte’s prediction came true-that the money we’d get as a payout would go a long way toward justifying whatever wrong we’d done to get it? What if this lawsuit made it possible for you to have any adaptive aid you needed, any therapy not covered by insurance?

If I really wanted what was best for you, how could I sign those papers?

How could I not ?

Suddenly, I wanted to make Charlotte see how this was tearing me up inside. I wanted her to feel the same sick knot that I felt every time I opened up my glove compartment and saw that envelope. It was like Pandora’s box-she had opened it, and what had flown out but a solution to a problem we never imagined could be solved. Closing the lid now wouldn’t change anything; we couldn’t unlearn what we now knew to be possible.

I guess, if I was being honest, I wanted to punish her for putting me into this situation, where there was no black and white but a thousand shades of gray.

She was surprised when I grabbed her and kissed her. She backed away at first, looking at me, and then leaned into my body, trusting me to take her down a dizzy road where I’d taken her a thousand times before. “I love you,” I said. “Do you believe that?”

Charlotte nodded, and as soon as she did, I tightened my fingers in her hair, forcing her head back and pinning her to the mattress. “Sean, you’re crushing me,” she whispered, and I covered her mouth with one hand and roughly ripped aside her pajama bottoms with the other. I forced my way inside her, even as she fought against me, even as I watched her back arch with surprise and maybe pain, even as her eyes filled with tears. “Doesn’t matter what it looks like on the surface,” I whispered, her own words striking her like a whip. “You know deep down that I love you.”

I had started this wanting to make Charlotte feel like crap, but somehow, I wound up feeling like crap myself. So I rolled off her, yanking up my boxers. Charlotte turned away, curling into a ball. “You bastard,” she sobbed. “You fucking bastard.”

She was right; I was one. I had to be, or I wouldn’t have been able to do what I did next: walk out to the car and get those papers from the glove compartment. Sit in the dark in the kitchen the whole of the night, staring at them, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something more acceptable. Knock down a shot of whiskey for each of the lines where Marin Gates had placed a little yellow Post-it arrow, pointing to the space where my signature was supposed to be.

I fell asleep at the kitchen table, waking before the sun did. When I tiptoed into the bedroom, Charlotte was still sleeping. She was on her side curled like a snail, the sheet and comforter balled at the bottom of the bed. I pulled them over her gently, the way I sometimes did for you when you’d kicked your blankets loose.

I left the papers, signed in all the right places, on the pillow beside her. With a note paper-clipped to the top. I’m sorry, I had written. Forgive me .

Then I drove to work, wondering the whole time whether that message had been intended for Charlotte, for you, or for myself.

Late August 2007

Let’s just say right off the bat that we lived in the sticks, and although my parents seemed to think this was going to be a huge benefit to me later in life (Why? Because I’d know what green grass smelled like firsthand? Because we didn’t have to lock our front door?), I for one wished I’d had a vote when it came to settling down. Do you have any idea what it’s like not to be able to get a cable modem when even Eskimos have them? Or to go shopping for school clothes at Wal-Mart because the nearest mall is an hour and a half away? Last year in social studies, when we were studying cruel and unusual punishment, I wrote a whole essay about living where the retail opportunities were somewhere between zero and nil, and although everyone in my class totally agreed with me, I only got a B, because my teacher was the kind of Birkenstock-granola hippie who thought Bankton, New Hampshire, was the best place on earth.

Today, though, all the planets must have aligned, because my mother had agreed to road-trip to Target with you and Piper and Emma.

It had been Piper’s idea-right before the school year started she occasionally decided to do a mother-daughter shopping extravaganza. My mother usually had to be persuaded to come along, because we never seemed to have enough cash. Inevitably, Piper would wind up buying things for me, and my mother would feel guilty and swear she was never going shopping with Piper again. What’s the big deal? Piper would say. I like making the girls happy . What’s the big deal indeed? If Piper wanted to pad my wardrobe, I wasn’t about to deny her that one small joy.

When Piper called this morning, though, I thought my mother would jump at the opportunity. You had once again managed to outgrow a pair of shoes without ever wearing them. Usually it was just one or the other-the left one got used while the right foot was stuck in a cast for a few months-but with the spica you’d worn this spring, both your feet had managed to grow a whole size, and the soles of your old shoes were barely even scuffed. Now-six months later, when you were officially learning to walk again-it had taken my mother a week to figure out that the reason you winced every time she made you use the walker to get to the bathroom by yourself had nothing to do with pain in your legs but actually with your feet being stuffed into too-tight sneakers.

To my surprise, my mother didn’t want to go. She had been in a really weird mood; she had practically leapt out of her skin when I came up behind her while she was drinking a cup of coffee and reading some legal papers that looked totally boring and full of words like IN RE and WHOSOEVER . And when Piper called and I handed her the phone, Mom dropped it twice. “I can’t,” I heard her tell Piper. “I’ve got some really important errands to run.”

“Please, Mom?” I said, dancing around in front of her. “I promise, I won’t even take a stick of gum from Piper. Not like last time.”

Something I said must have struck a chord, because she looked down at those papers and then up at me. “Last time,” she repeated absently, and the next thing I knew, we were on our way to Concord, to go shopping. My mother was still a little out of it, but I didn’t notice. Piper’s van had a DVD system, and you and Emma and I had wireless headphones on so that we could listen to 13 Going on 30, which is the best movie ever. The last time I’d watched it had been at our house, and Piper had done the whole “Thriller” dance along with Jennifer Garner, leading Emma to proclaim that she just wanted to die of embarrassment on the spot, even though I secretly thought it was really cool that Piper could remember all the steps.