Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

“That’s exactly the statement you gave an hour ago.” The detective threw down his pen. “I thought you were going to tell me what happened.”

“I did. I just didn’t tell you what you wanted to hear.”

The detective stood up. “Sean O’Keefe,” he said. “You’re under arrest.”

By seven on Sunday morning, I was pacing in the waiting room of the police station, a free man, waiting for Charlotte to be released. The desk sergeant who let me out of the lockup shuffled beside me, uncomfortable. “I’m sure you understand,” he said. “Given the circumstances, we were only doing our job.”

My jaw tightened. “Where’s my older daughter?”

“DCF is on their way here with her.”

I had been told-professional courtesy-that Louie, the dispatcher at the Bankton PD who confirmed my claim to be an officer with the department, also told them you had a disease that caused your bones to break easily, but that DCF wouldn’t release Willow until they had confirmation from a medical professional. So I’d prayed half the night-although I have to admit I give less credit for our release to Jesus than I do to your mother. Charlotte watched enough Law & Order to know that once her rights had been read to her she was allowed a phone call-and to my surprise, she didn’t use it to contact you. Instead, she called Piper Reece, her best friend.

I like Piper, honestly, I do. God knows I love her for whatever connections she used to cold-call Mark Rosenblad at three a.m. on a weekend and get him to phone the hospital where you were being treated. I even owe Piper for my marriage-she and Rob are the ones who introduced me to Charlotte. But all this being said, sometimes Piper is…just a little too much. She’s smart and opinionated and frustratingly right most of the time. Most of the fights I’ve had with your mother have had their roots in something Piper got her thinking about. The thing is, where Piper can carry off that brashness and confidence, on Charlotte, it seems a little off-like a kid playing dress-up in her mom’s closet. Your mother is quieter, more of a mystery; her strengths sneak up on you instead of smacking you front and center. If Piper’s the one you notice when you walk into a room, with her boy-cut blond hair and forever legs and her wide smile, Charlotte’s the one you find yourself thinking about long after you’ve left. But then again, that in-your-face fierceness that makes Piper so exhausting sometimes is also what got me out of the lockup in Lake Buena Vista. I suppose this means, in the grand cosmic tally, I have something else to thank her for.

Suddenly a door opened, and I could see Charlotte-dazed, pale, her brown curls tumbling out of her ponytail elastic. She was blistering the officer escorting her: “If Amelia isn’t back here before I count to ten, I swear I’ll-”

God, I love your mother. She and I think exactly alike, when it counts.

Then she noticed me and broke off. “Sean!” she cried, and ran into my arms.

I wish you could know what it feels like to find the missing piece of you, the thing that makes you stronger. Charlotte’s that, for me. She’s tiny, only five-two, but underneath her serpentine curves-the ones she’s always stressing out about because she’s not a size four like Piper-are muscles that would surprise you, developed from years of hauling flour when she was a pastry chef and-later-you and your equipment.

“You all right, baby?” I murmured against her hair. She smelled like apples and suntan lotion. She’d made us all put it on before we even left the Orlando airport. To be safe, she’d said.

She didn’t answer, just nodded against my chest.

There was a cry from the doorway, and we both looked up in time to see Amelia barreling toward us. “I forgot,” she sobbed. “Mom, I forgot to take the doctor’s note. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not anyone’s fault.” I knelt down and brushed her tears away with my thumbs. “Let’s get out of here.”

The desk sergeant had offered to drive us to the hospital in a cruiser, but I asked him to call us a cab instead; I wanted them to stew in their own poor judgment instead of trying to make it up to us. As the taxi pulled up in front of the police department entrance, we three moved as a unit out the front door. I let Charlotte and Amelia slide into the cab before getting in myself. “To the hospital,” I told the driver, and I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the padded seat.

“Thank God,” your mother said. “Thank God that’s over.”

I didn’t even open my eyes. “It’s not over,” I said. “Someone is going to pay.”

Suffice it to say that the trip home wasn’t a pleasant one. You had been put into a spica cast-surely one of the biggest torture devices ever created by doctors. It was a half shell of plaster that covered you from knee to ribs. You were in a semireclined position, because that’s what your bones needed to knit together. The cast kept your legs splayed wide so that the femurs would set correctly. Here’s what we were told:

1. You would wear this cast for four months.

2. Then it would be sliced in half, and you would spend weeks sitting in it like an oyster on the half shell, trying to rebuild your stomach muscles so that you could sit upright again.

3. The small square cutout of the plaster at your belly would allow your stomach to expand while you ate.

4. The open gash between your legs was left so you could go to the bathroom.

Here’s what we were not told:

1. You wouldn’t be able to sit completely upright, or lie completely down.

2. You couldn’t fly back to New Hampshire in a normal plane seat.

3. You couldn’t even lie down in the back of a normal car.

4. You wouldn’t be able to sit comfortably for long periods in your wheelchair.

5. Your clothes wouldn’t fit over the cast.

Because of all these things, we did not leave Florida immediately. We rented a Suburban, with three full bench seats, and settled Amelia in the back. You had the whole middle bench, and we padded this with blankets we’d bought at Wal-Mart. There we’d also bought men’s T-shirts and boxer shorts-the elastic waists could stretch over the cast and be belted with a hair scrunchie if you pulled the extra fabric to the side, and if you didn’t look too closely, they almost passed for shorts. They were not fashionable, but they covered up your crotch, which was left wide open by the position of the cast.

Then we started the long drive home.

You slept; the painkillers they’d given you at the hospital were still swimming through your blood. Amelia alternated between doing word search puzzles and asking if we were almost home yet. We ate at drive-through restaurants, because you couldn’t sit up at a table.

Seven hours into our journey, Amelia shifted in the backseat. “You know how Mrs. Grey always makes us write about the cool stuff we did over vacation? I’m going to talk about you guys trying to figure out how to get Willow onto the toilet to pee.”

“Don’t you dare,” I said.

“Well, if I don’t, my essay’s going to be really short.”

“We could make the rest of the trip fun,” I suggested at one point. “Stop off in Memphis at Graceland…or Washington, D.C…”

“Or we could just drive straight through and be done with it,” Sean said.

I glanced at him. In the dark, a green band of light from the dashboard reflected like a mask around his eyes.

“Could we go to the White House?” Amelia asked, perking up.

I imagined the hothouse of humidity that Washington would be; I pictured us lugging you around on our hips as we climbed the steps to the Air and Space Museum. Out the window, the black road was a ribbon that kept unraveling in front of us; we couldn’t manage to catch up to its end. “Your father’s right,” I said.