Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

She scuffed at the ground with her sneaker. “My baby would have been two years, six months, and four days old today,” she said. “There was something wrong with her, something genetic. If she lived, she would have been profoundly retarded. Like a six-month-old, forever.” She took a deep breath. “It was my mother who talked me into it. She said, Annie, you can barely take care of yourself. How are you going to take care of a baby like that? She said, You’re young. You’ll have another one. So I gave in, and my doctor induced me at twenty-two weeks.” Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. “Here’s what no one tells you,” she said. “When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.” She looked up at me. “You can’t win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don’t have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn’t do the wrong thing. But I don’t feel like I did the right thing, either.”

There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met.

“They gave me a choice,” Annie said, “and even now, I wish they hadn’t.”

That night, I let you brush my hair and stick scrunchies all over it. Usually, you just made massive knots and annoyed me, but you loved doing it-your arms were too short for you to manage even a ponytail yourself, so when other girls your age were playing around with their hair and putting in ribbons and braids, you were stuck at the mercy of Mom, whose braiding experience was limited to challah. Don’t go thinking I’d suddenly developed a conscience or anything-I just felt bad for you. Mom and Dad had been yelling about you as if you weren’t there ever since they’d come home. I mean, for God’s sake, your vocabulary was better than mine half the time-they couldn’t possibly think this had all gone over your head.

“Amelia?” you asked, finishing off a braid that hung right over my nose. “I like your hair this color.”

I scrutinized myself in the mirror. I didn’t look like a cool punk chick, in spite of my best intentions. I looked more like Grover the Muppet.

“Amelia? Are Mom and Dad going to get a divorce?”

I met your gaze in the mirror. “I don’t know, Wills.”

I was already anticipating the next question: “Amelia?” you asked. “Is it my fault?”

“No,” I said fiercely. “Honest.” I pulled the barrettes and scrunchies out of my hair and started unraveling the knots. “Okay, enough. I’m not beauty queen material. Go to bed.”

Everyone had forgotten to tuck you in tonight-not that I was expecting any better, with the pathetic level of parenting skills I was witnessing these days. You crawled into your bed from the open end-it still had bars on either side of the mattress, which you hated, because you said they were for babies even if they did keep you safe. I leaned down and tucked you in. Awkwardly, I even kissed your forehead. “’Night,” I said, and I jumped under my own covers and turned off the light.

Sometimes, in the dark, the house felt like it had a heartbeat. I could hear it pulsing, waa waa waa, in my ears. It was even louder now. Maybe my new hair was some kind of superconductor. “You know how Mom always says that I can be anything when I grow up?” you whispered. “That’s a lie.”

I came up on one elbow. “Why?”

“I couldn’t be a boy,” you said.

I smirked. “Ask Mom about that sometime.”

“And I couldn’t be Miss America.”

“How come?”

“You can’t wear leg braces in a pageant,” you said.

I thought about those pageants, girls too beautiful to be real, tall and thin and plastic-perfect. And then I thought of you, short and stubby and twisted, like a root growing wrong from the trunk of a tree, with a banner draped across your chest.

MISS UNDERSTOOD.

MISS INFORMED.

MISS TAKE.

That made my stomach hurt. “Go to sleep already,” I said, more harshly than I meant to, and I counted to 1036 before you started snoring.

Downstairs, I tiptoed into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. There was absolutely no food in this house. I would probably have to eat ramen for breakfast. It was getting to the point, honestly, where if my parents didn’t go to the grocery store, they could be called to task for child abuse.

Been there, done that.

I rummaged through the fruit drawer and unearthed a fossilized lemon and a knob of ginger.

I slammed the refrigerator door shut and heard a moan.

Terrified-did people who broke into houses rape girls with blue hair?-I crept toward the kitchen doorway and looked into the living room. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness again, I saw it: the quilt draped across the back of the couch, the pillow my father had pulled over his head when he rolled over.

I felt the same pang in my stomach that I had felt when you were talking about beauty queens. Moving back through the kitchen as silent as snow, I trailed my fingers along the countertop until they closed over the hilt of a carving knife. I carried it upstairs with me into the bathroom.

The first cut stung. I watched the blood rise like a tide and spill down into my elbow. Shit, what had I done? I ran the cold water, held my forearm underneath it until the blood slowed.

Then I made another parallel cut.

They weren’t on my wrists, don’t think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly why I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period. I could feel everything building up inside of me like steam heat, and I was just turning a valve. It made me think of my mother, when she made her pie crusts. She’d prick little holes all over the place. So it can breathe, she said.

I was just breathing .

I closed my eyes, anticipating each thin cut, feeling that wash of relief when it was done. God, it felt so good-that buildup, and the sweet release. I would have to hide these marks, because I would rather die than let anyone know I’d done this. But I was also proud of myself, a little bit. Crazy girls did this-the ones who wrote poetry about their organs being filled with tar and who wore so much black eyeliner they looked Egyptian-not good girls from good families. That meant either I was not a good girl or I did not come from a good family.

Take your pick.

I opened the tank of the toilet and stuck the knife inside. Maybe I would need it again.

I stared at the cuts, which were pulsing now, just like the rest of the house, waa waa waa. They looked like the ties of railroad tracks. Like a tower of stairs you’d find on a stage. I pictured a parade of ugly people like me, we beauty queens who could not walk without braces. I closed my eyes, and I imagined where those steps would lead.

Hardball: one of the stages of sugar syrup in the preparation of candy, which occurs at 250 to 266 degrees Fahrenheit.

Nougat, marshmallows, rock candy, gummies-these are all cooked to the hardball stage, when the sugar concentration is very high and syrup will form thick ropes when dripped from a spoon. (Be careful. Sugar burns long after it comes into contact with your skin; it’s easy to forget that something so sweet can leave a scar.) To test your solution, drop a bit of it into cold water. It’s ready if it forms a hard ball that doesn’t flatten when fished out but whose shape can still be changed with significant pressure.