Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

“You should go out and have fun,” he suggested. “See a movie. Visit a friend.”

I didn’t have any friends, anymore.

“Right,” I said, forcing a smile. “Sounds great.”

There was a fine line, I thought an hour later as I pulled out of the driveway, between being kicked out of your house and not being welcome there, but from my vantage point, they looked pretty much the same. I drove to the gas station and filled up, and then just…well…began to aimlessly tool around in the car. For all of your life, I’d either been with you or been waiting for a phone call to tell me you had broken; this freedom was almost overwhelming. I didn’t feel relieved, just untethered.

Before I realized it, I had driven to Marin’s office. This would have made me laugh if it wasn’t so blatantly depressing. Grabbing my purse, I went inside and took the elevator upstairs. Briony, the receptionist, was on the phone when I entered, but she waved me back down the hallway.

I knocked on Marin’s door. “Hi,” I said, peeking around the corner.

She looked up. “Charlotte! Come on in.” As I sat down in one of the leather chairs, she stood up and came around to lean against the desk. “Did you talk to Sutton?”

“Yes, it’s…overwhelming.”

“I can imagine.”

“Sean’s at my house now,” I blurted out. “We’re trying to work out a schedule, so that we’re both taking care of the girls.”

“That sounds awfully mature.”

I glanced up at her. “How can I miss him more when he’s two feet away from me than when he’s not around?”

“You’re not really missing him. You’re missing the idea of what she could have been.”

“He,” I corrected, and Marin blinked.

“Right,” she said. “Of course.”

I hesitated. “I know it’s office hours and everything, but would you want to go grab a cup of coffee? I mean, we could pretend that it’s an attorney-client thing…”

“It is an attorney-client thing, Charlotte,” Marin said stiffly. “I’m not your friend…I’m your lawyer, and to be perfectly honest, that’s already required putting aside some of my personal feelings.”

I felt a flush rise up my neck. “Why? What did I ever do to you?”

“Not you,” Marin said. She looked uncomfortable, too. “I just-This is not the kind of case I would personally endorse.”

My own lawyer thought I shouldn’t sue for wrongful birth?

Marin stood up. “I’m not saying you don’t have a good chance of winning,” she clarified, as if she’d heard me out loud. “I’m just saying that morally-philosophically-well, I understand where your husband is coming from, that’s all.”

I stood up, reeling. “I can’t believe I’m arguing with my own attorney about justice and accountability,” I said, grabbing my purse. “Maybe I should be hiring another firm.” I was halfway down the hallway when I heard Marin call after me. She was standing in the doorway, her fists clenched at her sides.

“I’m trying to find my birth mother,” she said. “That’s why I’m not thrilled about your case. It’s why I won’t be having coffee with you or hoping that we’ll have a sleepover and do each other’s hair. If this world existed the way you want, Charlotte, with babies being disposable if they aren’t exactly what a woman wants or needs or dreams of, you wouldn’t even have a lawyer right now.”

“I love Willow,” I said, swallowing hard. “I’m doing what I think is best for her. And you’re judging me for that?”

“Yes,” Marin admitted. “The same way I judge my mother for doing what she thought was best for me.”

For a few moments after she went back into her office, I stood in the hallway, leaning against the wall for support. The problem with this lawsuit was that it didn’t exist in a vacuum. You could look at it theoretically and think, Hm , yes, that makes perfect sense . But no real thought occurred in such sterile conditions. When you read a news article about me suing Piper, when you saw A Day in the Life of Willow on video, you brought with you preconceived notions, opinions, a history.

It was why Marin had to swallow her anger while she worked on my case.

It was why Sean couldn’t understand my reasoning.

And it was why I was so afraid to admit that one day, looking back on this, you might hate me.

Wal-Mart became my playground.

I wandered up and down the aisles, trying on hats and shoes, looking at myself in mirrors, stacking Rubbermaid bins one inside the other. I pedaled an exercise bike and pushed buttons on talking dolls and listened to sample tracks from CDs. I couldn’t afford to buy anything, but I could spend hours looking.

I didn’t know how I would support you kids by myself. I knew that alimony and child support figured into that somehow, but no one had ever explained the math to me. Presumably, though, I would have to be able to provide for you if any court was going to find me a fit parent.

I could bake.

The thought snaked into my mind before I could dismiss it. No one made a living with cupcakes, with pastries. True, I had been selling for a few months now; I’d made enough money to fly to the Omaha OI convention and to attract the attention of a string of service stations. But I couldn’t work for a restaurant or expand my market past the Gas-n-Get. At any moment, you might fall and need me.

“Pretty sweet, huh?”

I turned to find a Wal-Mart employee standing beside me, staring up at a trampoline that had been half erected to show actual size. He looked to be about twenty, and he had such severe acne that his face looked like a swollen tomato. “When I was a kid, I wanted a trampoline more than anything else in the world.”

When he was a kid? He was still a kid. He had a lifetime of mistakes left to make.

“So, you got children who like to jump?” he asked.

I tried to picture you on this trampoline. Your hair would fly out behind you; you’d somersault and not break. I glanced at the price tag, as if this item was actually something I would consider. “It’s expensive. I think I may have to browse a little more before I decide.”

“No prob,” he said, and he sauntered off, leaving me to trail my hands over shelves full of tennis racquets and stubbled skateboards, to smell the acrid wheels of the bicycles, strung overhead like haunches in a butcher’s shop, to envision you bouncing and healthy, a girl you would never be.

The church I went to later that day was not my own. It was thirty miles north, in a town I knew only from the highway road sign. It smelled overpoweringly of beeswax, and the morning Mass had recently let out, so a number of parishioners were praying quietly in the pews. I slipped into one and said an Our Father under my breath and stared up at the Cross on the altar. All my life I’d been told that if I fell off a cliff, God was there to catch me. Why wasn’t that true, physically, for my daughter?

There was a memory I’d been having lately: a nurse on the birthing ward looked at you in your foam-lined bassinet, with tiny bandages wrapped around your limbs. “You’re young,” she said, patting my arm. “You can have another one.”

I could not recall whether you had just been born or if this was several days later. If anyone else was there to hear her, or if she’d even been real or just a trick of the drugs I was taking for pain. Did I make her up, so that she could say aloud what I had been thinking silently? This is not my baby; I want the one I’ve dreamed of .

I heard a curtain open, and I stepped up to the empty confessional. I slid open the grate between me and the priest. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said. “It has been three weeks since my last confession.” I took a deep breath. “My daughter is sick,” I said. “Very sick. And I’ve started a lawsuit against the doctor who treated me when I was pregnant. I’m doing it for the money,” I admitted. “But to get it, I have to say that I’d have had an abortion, if I’d known about my baby’s illness earlier.”