Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

“Um.” I sat down. “Shouldn’t they all be equal?”

“Not when you figure in the Get Out of Jail cards and stuff like that. It’s Illinois.”

I glanced down. You had built three hotels on Illinois Avenue.

And Amelia had left me with sixty dollars.

“How did you know that?” I asked.

“I read. And I like to know things no one else does.”

I bet there was a great deal you knew that none of us did, or ever would. It was a little disconcerting to be sitting with an almost-six-year-old whose vocabulary probably rivaled mine. “So tell me something I don’t know,” I said.

“Dr. Seuss invented the word nerd .”

I laughed out loud. “Really?”

You nodded. “In If I Ran the Zoo . Which isn’t as good as Green Eggs and Ham . Which is for babies, anyway,” you said. “I like Harper Lee better.”

“Harper Lee?” I repeated.

“Yeah. Haven’t you ever read To Kill a Mockingbird ?”

“Sure. I just can’t believe you have.” This was the first conversa tion I’d really had with the little girl who was the eye in the storm of this lawsuit, and I realized something remarkable: I liked you. I liked you a lot. You were genuine and funny and smart, and maybe your bones broke every now and then. I liked you for dismissing your condition as the least important part of you-nearly as much as I disliked your mother for highlighting it.

“So, anyway, it was Amelia’s turn. Which means you get to roll,” you said.

I glanced down at the board. “You know what? I hate Monopoly.” I did, truly. I had bad flashbacks from my childhood of a cousin who embezzled when he was the banker, of games that lasted four nights in a row.

“You want to play something else?”

Turning to the hearth again, and its toy detritus, I spied a dollhouse. It was a miniature of your home, with its black shutters and bright red door; there were even flowering shrubs for landscaping and long woven tongues of carpet. “Wow,” I said, touching the shingles reverently. “This is amazing.”

“My dad made it.”

I lifted the house up on its platform and settled it on top of the Monopoly board. “I used to have a dollhouse.”

It had been my favorite toy. I remembered tufted red velvet chairs in the miniature living room, and an old-time piano that played music when I turned its crank. A claw-footed tub, and candy-striped wallpaper. It looked completely Victorian, nothing like the modern house where I had grown up; yet I used to pretend, as I organized the beds and sofas and kitchen furniture, that this was an alternate universe, the home where I might have lived if I hadn’t been given away.

“Look at this,” you said, and you showed me how the little porcelain toilet seat lifted up. I wondered if dollhouse men forgot to put it back down, too.

In the refrigerator were little wooden steaks and milk bottles, and a tiny carton of eggs lined up like seed pearls. I raised the hinge of a woven basket to find two splinters of knitting needles and a ball of yarn.

“This is where the sisters live,” you said, and you set mattresses onto the twin brass bed frames in one upstairs room. “And this is where their mom sleeps.” Next door, on the big bed, you placed two pillows and a crazy quilt the size of my palm. Then you took another blanket and pillow, and made up a bed on the pink satin couch in the parlor. “And this,” you said, “is for the daddy.”

Oh my God, I thought. How they’ve screwed you up .

Suddenly the front door opened and Charlotte entered, a winter chill caught in the folds of her coat. She was carrying groceries in recyclable green bags draped over her arms. “Oh, that’s your car,” she said, dumping the food onto the floor. “Amelia!” she called upstairs. “I’m home!”

“Yay,” Amelia’s voice drifted down, devoid of enthusiasm.

Maybe it wasn’t just you they were destroying.

Charlotte leaned down and kissed your forehead. “How you doing, sweet pea? You’re playing with the dollhouse. I haven’t seen you take that out in ages…”

“We have to talk,” I said, getting to my feet.

“Okay.” Charlotte bent to gather some of the grocery bags; I did the same and followed her into the kitchen. She began to unpack: orange juice, milk, broccoli. Macaroni and cheese, dishwashing detergent, Ziploc bags.

Bounty. Joy. Life: brands that were a recipe for existence.

“Guy Booker’s added a witness for the defense,” I said. “Your husband.”

Charlotte was holding a jar of pickles one moment, and the next, it had shattered all over the floor. “ What did you say?”

“Sean’s testifying against you,” I said flatly.

“He can’t do that, can he?”

“Well, once he asked to be released from the lawsuit-”

“He did what ?”

The smell of vinegar rose; brine pooled on the tile floor. “Charlotte,” I said, stunned. “He told me he talked to you first.”

“He hasn’t talked to me in weeks. How could he? How could he do this to us?”

You came into the kitchen then. “Did something break?”

Charlotte got down on her hands and knees and began to gather the pieces of glass. “Stay out of the kitchen, Willow.” I reached for the new roll of paper toweling just as Charlotte let out a sharp cry; a shard of glass had pierced her finger.

It was bleeding. Your eyes went wide, and I hustled you toward the living room again. “Go get your mom a Band-Aid,” I said.

By the time I got back to the kitchen, Charlotte was clutching her bloody hand against her shirt. “Marin,” she said, staring up at me. “What am I supposed to do?”

It was probably a new experience for you, going to the hospital when you weren’t the one who was hurt. But it became clear very quickly that your mother’s cut had gone too deep, that a Band-Aid alone wasn’t going to be the answer. I drove her to the ER, with you and Amelia sitting in the back of the car, your feet propped up on cardboard boxes full of legal folders. I waited while a doctor sewed two stitches into the tip of Charlotte’s ring finger, as you sat beside her and held her good hand tight. I offered to stop at the pharmacy to fill the prescription for Tylenol plus codeine, but Charlotte said they still had plenty of painkillers at home left from your last break.

“I’m fine,” she told me. “Really.” I almost believed her, too, and then I remembered the way she’d clutched your hand during the stitches, and what she still planned to say to a jury in a matter of weeks about you.

I went back to the office, although the day was shot to hell. I took Maisie’s guidelines for writing a letter to one’s birth mother out of my top desk drawer and read through them one last time.

Families were never what you wanted them to be. We all wanted what we couldn’t have: the perfect child, the doting husband, the mother who’d let us go. We lived in our grown-up dollhouses completely unaware that, at any moment, a hand might come in and change around everything we’d become accustomed to.

Hello, I scrawled.

I’ve probably written this letter a thousand times in my head, always reworking it to make sure it’s just right. It took me thirty-one years to start my search, although I’ve always wondered where I came from. I think I had to figure out first why I wanted to search-and I finally know the answer. I owe my birth parents a very big thank-you. And almost equally important, I feel like you’re owed the right to know that I’m alive, well, and happy.

I work for a law firm in Nashua. I attended college at UNH and then went to law school at the University of Maine. I volunteer monthly to give legal advice to those who can’t afford it. I’m not married, but I hope that one day I will be. I like to kayak, read, and eat anything that’s chocolate.