Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

I knew when she arrived. The roar on the steps was audible, and when she finally breached the door of the courthouse, the press poured in after her. I immediately hooked my arm through hers, muttering “No comment” as I dragged Charlotte down a hallway and into a private room, locking the door behind me.

“My God,” she said, still stunned. “There are so many of them.”

“Slow news day in New Hampshire,” I reasoned. “I would have been happy to wait for you out in the parking lot and take you through the back way, but that would actually have meant you’d returned my seven thousand messages this weekend, so that we could arrange a time to meet.”

Charlotte stared blankly out the window at the white vans and their satellite dishes. “I didn’t know you called. I wasn’t home. Willow broke her femur. We spent the weekend at the hospital, having a rod surgically implanted.”

I felt my cheeks burn with embarrassment. Charlotte hadn’t been ignoring my calls; she’d been putting out a fire. “Is she all right?”

“She broke it running away from us. Sean told her about the divorce.”

“I don’t think any kid wants to hear something like that.” I hesitated. “I know you’ve got a lot on your mind, but I wanted to have a few minutes to talk to you about what’s going to happen today-”

“Marin,” Charlotte said. “I can’t do this.”

“Come again?”

“I can’t do this.” She looked up at me. “I really don’t think I can go through with it.”

“If this is about the media-”

“It’s about my daughter. It’s about my husband. I don’t care how the rest of the world sees me, Marin. But I do care what they think.”

I considered the countless hours I’d spent preparing for this trial, all the expert witnesses I’d interviewed and all the motions I’d filed. Somehow, in my mind, it was tangled up with the fruitless search for my mother, who had finally responded to Maisie the court clerk’s phone call, asking her to send along my letter. “Now’s a little late to break this news to me, don’t you think?”

Charlotte faced me. “My daughter thinks I don’t want her, because she’s broken.”

“Well, what did you think she’d believe?”

“Me,” Charlotte said softly. “I thought she’d believe me .”

“Then make her. Get up on that witness stand and say that you love her.”

“That’s sort of at odds with saying I’d have terminated the pregnancy, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive,” I said. “You don’t want to lie on the stand. I don’t want you to lie on the stand. But I certainly don’t want you judging yourself before a jury does.”

“How can’t they? You even did it, Marin. You as much as admitted that, if your mother had been like me, you wouldn’t be here today.”

“My mother was like you,” I confessed. “She didn’t have a choice.” I sat down on a desk across from Charlotte. “Just a few weeks after she gave birth to me, abortion became legal. I don’t know if she would have made the same decision if I’d been conceived nine months later. I don’t know if her life would have been any better. But I do know it would have been different.”

“Different,” Charlotte repeated.

“You told me a year and a half ago that you wanted Willow to have opportunities to do things she might not otherwise be able to do,” I said. “Didn’t you deserve the same?”

I held my breath until Charlotte lifted her face to mine. “How long before we start?” she asked.

The jury, which had looked so disparate on Friday, seemed to be a unified body already first thing Monday morning. Judge Gellar had dyed his hair over the weekend, a deep black Grecian Formula that drew my eyes like a magnet and made him look like an Elvis impersonator-never a good image to associate with a judge you are desperate to impress. When he instructed the four cameras that had been allowed in to report on the trial, I almost expected him to break out in a resounding chorus of “Burning Love.”

The courtroom was full-of media, of disability-rights advocates, of people who just liked to see a good show. Charlotte was trembling beside me, staring down at her lap. “Ms. Gates,” Judge Gellar said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

I squeezed Charlotte’s hand, then stood up to face the jury. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “I’d like to tell you about a little girl named Willow O’Keefe.”

I walked toward them. “Willow’s six and a half years old,” I said, “and she’s broken sixty-eight bones in her lifetime. The most recent one was Friday night, when her mom got home from jury selection. Willow was running and slipped. She broke her femur and had to have surgery to put a rod inside it. But Willow’s also broken bones when she’s sneezed. When she’s bumped into a table. When she’s rolled over in her sleep. That’s because Willow has osteogenesis imperfecta, an illness you might know as brittle bone syndrome. It means she has been and always will be susceptible to broken bones.”

I held up my right hand. “I broke my arm once in second grade. A girl named Lulu, who was the class bully, thought it would be funny to push me off the jungle gym to see if I could fly. I don’t remember much about that break, except that it hurt like crazy. Every time Willow breaks a bone, it hurts just as much as it would if you or I broke a bone. The difference is that hers break more rapidly, and more easily. Because of this, from her birth, osteogenesis imperfecta has meant a lifetime of setbacks, rehabilitation, therapy, and surgeries for Willow, a lifetime of pain. And what osteogenesis imperfecta has meant for her mother, Charlotte, is a life interrupted.”

I walked back toward our table. “Charlotte O’Keefe was a successful pastry chef whose strength was an asset. She was used to hauling around fifty-pound bags of flour and punching dough-and now every movement of hers is done with finesse, since even lifting her daughter the wrong way can cause a break. If you ask Charlotte, she’ll tell you how much she loves Willow. She’ll tell you her daughter never lets her down. But she can’t say the same about her obstetrician, Piper Reece-her friend, ladies and gentlemen-who knew that there was a problem with the fetus and failed to disclose it to Charlotte so that she could make decisions every prospective mother has the right to make.”

Facing the jury again, I spread my palms wide. “Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen, this case is not about feelings. It’s not about whether Charlotte O’Keefe adores her daughter. That’s a given. This case is about facts-facts that Piper Reece knew and dismissed. Facts that weren’t given to a patient by a physician she trusted. No one is blaming Dr. Reece for Willow’s condition; no one is saying she caused the illness. However, Dr. Reece is to blame for not giving the O’Keefes all the information she had. You see, at Charlotte’s eighteen-week ultrasound, there were already signs that the fetus suffered from osteogenesis imperfecta-signs that Dr. Reece ignored,” I said.

“Imagine if you, the jury, came into this courtroom expecting me to give you details about this case, and I did-but I held back one critical piece of information. Now imagine that, weeks after you’d rendered your verdict, you learned about this information. How would that make you feel? Angry? Troubled? Cheated? Maybe you’d even find yourself losing sleep at night, wondering if this information, presented earlier, might have changed your vote,” I said. “If I withheld information during a trial, that would be grounds for appeal. But when a physician withholds information from a patient, that’s malpractice.”