Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

So I stepped back and closed the door-but through the window, I tracked you for a few more moments anyway. In the kitchen, I began to pull ingredients from the fridge and I plugged in the waffle iron. I took out the plastic batter bowl you liked so much, because it was light enough for you to lift and pour.

I headed to the front porch again, to wait for you. But when I stepped outside, you were gone. I had a clear view from the driveway to the mailbox, and you were nowhere in it. Frantic, I stuffed my feet into a pair of boots and ran down the driveway. About halfway, I saw footsteps pressed into the snow that still blanketed the stiff grass, heading toward the skating pond.

“Willow!” I yelled. “Willow!”

Goddamn Sean, for not backing a load of fill into the pond like I’d asked him to.

Suddenly, there you were, at the edge of the reeds that fringed the thin ice.

You had one foot balanced on the surface. “Willow,” I said softly, so that I didn’t startle you, but when you turned around, your boot slipped and you pitched forward with your hands outstretched to break your fall.

I had seen it coming. I had seen it, and so I was already moving as you turned to face me. I stepped onto ice, which was still too new and thin to support any weight, and felt the lettuce edge shatter underneath my foot. My boot filled with frigid water, but I was able to wrap my arms around you, to keep you from falling.

I was soaked to midthigh, and your body was slung over my forearm like a sack of cake flour, the breath knocked out of you. I staggered backward, pulling my foot from the muck and the weeds that lined the bottom of the pond, and sat down hard to cushion your fall. “Are you all right?” I gasped. “Is anything broken?”

You did a quick internal assessment and shook your head.

“What were you thinking ? You know better-”

“ Amelia gets to walk on the ice,” you said, your voice small.

“First, you’re not Amelia. And second, this ice isn’t strong enough.”

You twisted around. “Like me.”

I turned you gently, so that you were sitting on my lap, with your legs on either side of mine. A spider, that’s what kids called it when they did it on swing sets, although you’d never been allowed. Too easily, a leg could snag on a chain, or get twisted with a friend’s limbs.

“It’s not like you,” I said firmly. “Willow, you are the strongest person I know.”

“But you still wish I didn’t have to use a wheelchair. Or go to the hospital all the time.”

Sean had insisted that you were well aware of what was going on around you; I had naïvely assumed that, after the talk we’d had months ago, if you did have doubts about my words, they’d be assuaged by my actions. But I had been worried about the things you’d hear me say-not the messages you might still read between the lines. “Remember how I told you that I’d have to say things that I don’t mean? That’s all it is, Willow.” I hesitated. “Imagine you’re at school and your friend asks you if you like her sneakers, and you don’t-you think they’re incredibly ugly. You wouldn’t tell her you hate them, would you? Because it would make her sad.”

“That’s lying.”

“I know. And it’s wrong, most of the time, unless you’re trying not to hurt someone’s feelings.”

You stared at me. “But you’re hurting my feelings.”

The knife in my stomach twisted. “I don’t mean to.”

“So,” you said, thinking hard, “it’s like when Amelia plays Opposite Day?”

Amelia had invented that when she was about your age. Confrontational even then, she’d refuse to do her homework and then burst out laughing when we yelled at her, saying it was Opposite Day and she’d already finished it all. Or she’d terrorize you, calling you Glass Ass, and when you came to us in tears, Amelia would insist that on Opposite Day, this meant you were a princess. I’d never been able to tell if Amelia had invented Opposite Day because she was imaginative or because she was subversive.

But maybe this was a way to unravel the tangled thicket that was wrongful birth, to spin a lie, like Rumpelstiltskin, into something golden. “Exactly,” I said. “Just like Opposite Day.”

You smiled at me so sweetly that I could feel the frost melting around us. “Okay then,” you said. “I wish you’d never been born, too.”

When Sean and I were first dating, I would leave treats in his mailbox. Sugar cookies cut in the shapes of his initials, a roll of babka, sticky buns with candied pecans, almond roca. I took literally the term sweet heart . I imagined him reaching in for his bills and catalogs and coming up instead with a jelly roll, a honey cake, a building block of fudge. “Will you still love me when I put on thirty pounds?” Sean would ask, and I’d laugh at him. “What makes you think I love you?” I’d say.

I did, of course. But it was always easier for me to show love than to say it. The word reminded me of pralines: small, precious, almost unbearably sweet. I would light up in his presence; I felt like a sun in the constellation of his embrace. But trying to put what I felt for him into words diminished it somehow, like pinning a butterfly under glass, or videotaping a comet. Each night he’d wrap his arms around me and tip into my ear that sentence, bubbles that burst on contact: I love you . And then he’d wait. He’d wait, and even though I knew he did not want to pressure me before I was ready to make my confession, I would feel in that silence his disappointment.

One day, when I came out of work still dusting flour off my hands so that I could rush to pick up Amelia from school, I found a small index card wedged under my windshield wiper. I LOVE YOU, it read.

I tucked it into my glove compartment, and that afternoon, I made truffles and left them in Sean’s mailbox.

The next day, when I left work, there was an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch piece of paper taped on my windshield: I LOVE YOU.

I called Sean. “I’m going to win,” I said.

“I think we both are,” he replied.

I’d baked a lavender panna cotta and left it on top of his MasterCard bill.

He countered with poster board. You could read the message all the way from the front window of the restaurant, which made me the object of plenty of ribbing from the maître d’ and the head chef.

“What’s your problem?” Piper said to me. “Just tell him how you feel, already.” But Piper didn’t understand, and I couldn’t explain to her. When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation. Those three words were what everyone used; simple syllables couldn’t contain something as rare as what I felt for Sean. I wanted him to feel what I felt when I was with him: that incredible combination of comfort, decadence, and wonder; the knowledge that, with just a single taste of him, I was addicted. So I cooked tiramisu and left it wedged between a package from Amazon.com and a flyer for a painting company.

This time, Sean phoned me. “Opening someone else’s mailbox is a felony, you know,” he said.

“So arrest me,” I answered.

That day, I left work-trailed by the rest of the staff, who had come to view our courtship as a spectator sport-and found my car completely wrapped in butcher paper. Painted in letters as tall as me was Sean’s message: I’M ON A DIET.

Sure enough, I baked him poppy scones, and they were still in the mailbox the next day when I went to leave off ginger cookies. And the next day, with those two items untouched, I couldn’t even fit the strawberry tart. I carried it up to his house instead, and rang the doorbell. His blond hair was backlit; his white tee stretched across his chest. “How come you’re not eating what I made for you?” I asked.