Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

I was not a mother; I might never be. But I’d certainly had my share of friends who couldn’t stand their own mothers-either they were too absent or too smothering; they complained too much or they noticed too little. Part of growing up was distancing yourself from your mother.

It was different for me. I’d grown up with a tiny buffer of space between my adoptive mother and myself. Once, in chemistry, I’d learned that objects never really touch-because of ions repelling, there’s always an infinitesimal space, so that even when it feels like you’re holding hands or rubbing up against something on the atomic level, you’re not. That was how I felt these days about my adoptive family: to the naked eye, we looked like a seamless, happy group. But I knew that, no matter how hard I tried, I’d never close that microscopic gap.

Maybe this was normal. Maybe mothers-consciously or subconsciously-repelled their daughters in different ways. Some knew what they were doing-like my birth mother, handing me over to another family. And some, like Charlotte, didn’t. Her exploiting you on film for what she believed to be the greater good made me hate her, hate this case. I wanted to finish filming; I wanted to get as far away from her as possible before I did something that was forbidden in my line of work: tell her how I really felt about her and her lawsuit.

But just as I was trying to figure out a way to wrap this up early, I got what I’d been wishing for-a crisis. Not in the form of you falling down but, instead, equipment failure: while Charlotte was packing up your equipment after school, she saw that your wheelchair tire had gone dead flat.

“Willow,” she said, exasperated. “Didn’t you notice ?”

“Do you have a spare?” I asked, wondering if there was a closet in the O’Keefe house that had extra parts for wheelchairs and braces, just as there was one full of splints, Ace bandages, slings, and doll plaster. “No,” Charlotte said. “But the bike store might.” She pulled out her cell phone and called Amelia. “I’m going to be a little late…No, she didn’t break. But her wheelchair did.”

The bike store didn’t have a size 22 wheel in stock, but they thought they might be able to order one in by the end of the week. “Which means,” Charlotte explained, “that either I can spend twice as much at a medical supply store in Boston or else Willow’s minus her chair for the rest of the week.”

An hour late, we pulled up to the middle school. Amelia was sitting on top of her backpack, glowering. “Just so you know,” she said, “I have three tests tomorrow.”

“Why didn’t you study while you were waiting for us?” you asked.

“Did I ask you for your opinion?”

By four o’clock I was exhausted. Charlotte was on the computer, trying to find discount wheelchair manufacturers online. Amelia was writing flash cards with French vocabulary on them. You were upstairs in your room, sitting on the floor with a pink ceramic pig on your lap.

“Sorry about your chair,” I said.

You shrugged. “Stuff like that happens a lot. Last time, the bike store had to get hair out from the front wheels because they stopped turning.”

“That’s pretty disgusting,” I said.

“Yeah…I guess it is.”

I settled down beside you as the videographer moved inconspicuously to a corner of the room. “You seem to have a lot of friends at school.”

“Not really. Most of the kids, they say stupid things like how lucky I am to get to ride in a wheelchair when they have to walk all the way down to the gym or around the playground or whatever.”

“But you don’t think it’s lucky.”

“No, because it’s only fun at first. It’s not so fun if you do it your whole life.” She looked up at me. “Those kids today? They’re not my friends.”

“They all wanted to sit next to you at snack-”

“What they wanted was to be in the movie.” You shook the ceramic pig in your lap. It jingled. “Did you know real pigs think, like we do? And they can learn tricks like dogs, only faster.”

“That’s impressive. Are you saving up to buy one?”

“No,” you said. “I’m giving my allowance money to my mother, so she can buy the tire for my wheelchair and not have to worry about how much it costs.” You pulled the black plug from between the pig’s legs, and a trickle of dimes and nickels, with the occasional wadded dollar, tumbled out. “Last time I counted I had seven dollars and sixteen cents.”

“Willow,” I said slowly. “Your mother didn’t ask you to pay for that wheel.”

“No, but if it doesn’t cost her any extra, she won’t have to get rid of me.”

I was struck silent. “Willow,” I said, “you know your mother loves you.”

You looked up at me.

“Sometimes, mothers say and do things that seem like they don’t want their kids…but when you look more closely, you realize that they’re doing those kids a favor. They’re just trying to give them a better life. Do you understand?”

“I guess.” You tipped over the piggy bank again. It sounded as if it were full of broken glass.

“Can I talk to you?” I said as I walked into the study where Charlotte was poring over the results of a search engine.

She jumped up. “I’m sorry. I know. You didn’t come here to film me surfing the Net for wheelchair tire patch kits.”

I closed the door behind me. “Forget about the camera, Charlotte. I was just upstairs with Willow, counting her piggy bank savings. She wants to give it to you. She’s trying to buy her way into your good graces.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Charlotte said.

“Why? What great leap of logic would you make if you were six years old and you knew that your mother had filed a lawsuit because something was wrong when you were born?”

“Aren’t you my lawyer?” Charlotte said. “Aren’t you supposed to be helping me instead of telling me I’m a rotten mother?”

“I am trying to help you. I don’t know how the hell I’m going to cobble together a video for the jury from this footage, to be honest. Because right now, if they saw it, they might feel sorry for Willow-but they’d hate you.”

Suddenly all of the fight went out of Charlotte. She sank back into the chair she’d been sitting on when I came into the room. “When you first mentioned wrongful birth, I felt like Sean did. Like it was the most disgusting term I’d ever heard in my life. All these years I’ve just gone along doing what needed to be done. I knew people watched me with Willow and thought, That poor girl. That poor mother . But you know, I never really pictured it that way. She was my baby and I was going to take care of her, and that was that.” Charlotte looked up at me. “Then, you and Robert Ramirez started talking, asking me questions. And I thought, Someone gets it . It felt like I’d been living underground, and for a moment, I’d been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you’ve seen that, how can you go back where you came from?”

I felt my cheeks burn. I knew exactly what Charlotte was talking about, and I did not like thinking I had anything in common with her. But I remembered the day when I’d been told I was adopted, when I realized there was another mother, another father out there somewhere I had never met. For years, even when it wasn’t in the forefront of my mind, it was still present, an itch just beneath the skin.

Lawyers were notorious for finding cases in the most unlikely places, especially ones with huge potential damages awards. But was the dissolution of this family really my fault? Had Bob and I created a monster?

“My mother’s in a nursing home now,” Charlotte said. “She can’t remember who I am, so I’ve become the keeper of the memories. I’m the one who tells her about the time she baked brownies for the entire senior class when I ran for student council, and how I won by a landslide. Or how she used to collect sea glass with me during the summer and put it in a jar next to my bed. I wonder what memories Willow will have to tell me, if it comes to that. I wonder if there’s a difference between being a dutiful mother and being a good mother.”