Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

“I still have to study,” I said, after we were left alone. “Let me go up and get my notebook and flash cards.”

“No, I’ll go upstairs instead,” you answered. “I kind of want to lie down.”

So I carried you-you were that light-and settled you on the bed with your crutches next to you. You picked up your latest book to start reading.

Scrutinize: to observe carefully.

Stature: the full height of a human.

I glanced at you over my shoulder. You were the size of a three-year-old, even though you were six and a half now. I wondered how small you’d stay. I thought about how there are kinds of goldfish that get bigger when you put them in large ponds and wondered if that would help: what if, instead of sitting in this bed, in this stupid house, I showed you the whole wide world?

“I could quiz you,” you said.

“Thanks, but I’m not ready yet. Maybe later.”

“Did you know Kermit the Frog is left-handed?” you asked.

“No.”

Dissipated: dissolved, faded away.

Elude: to escape from . I wish.

“Do you know how big a grave is when it’s dug?”

“Willow,” I said, “I’m trying to study here. Could you just shut up?”

“Seven feet, eight inches, by three feet, two inches, by six feet,” you whispered.

“Willow!”

You sat up. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

“Great. Don’t get lost,” I snapped. I watched you carefully lever your crutches so that you could hop your way off the bed. Usually Mom walked you to the bathroom-or, really, hovered -and then privacy kicked in and you booted her out and closed the door. “Do you need a hand?” I asked.

“Nope, just some collagen,” you said, and I almost cracked a smile.

A moment later, I heard the bathroom door lock. Scrupulous, devout, annihilate. Lethargic, lethal, subside . The world would be a much easier place if, instead of handing over superstuffed syllables all the time, we just said what we really meant. Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest-like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn’t noticed-weren’t sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward. If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I’m sorry .

I made it through Lesson 13 and Lesson 14- devious, aghast, rustic -and glanced down at my watch. It was only three o’clock. “Wiki,” I said, “what time did Mom say she’d be home-” And then I remembered you weren’t there.

You hadn’t been, for a good fifteen or twenty minutes.

No one had to go to the bathroom that long.

My pulse started racing. Had I been so engrossed in learning the definition of arbitration that I hadn’t heard a telltale fall? I ran to the bathroom door and rattled the knob. “Willow? Are you okay?”

There was no answer.

Sometimes I wonder what really constitutes an emergency.

I lifted up my leg and used my foot to break down the door.

The soup that came out of the vending machine at the courthouse looked-and tasted-just like the coffee. It was my third cup today, and I still wasn’t quite sure what I was drinking.

I was sitting near the window of my hiding place-my biggest accomplishment on this, the second day of the trial. I had planned to sit in the lobby until Guy Booker needed me-but I hadn’t counted on the press. The ones who hadn’t squeezed into the courtroom figured out who I was quickly enough and swarmed, leaving me to back away muttering No comment .

I’d poked through the maze of the courthouse corridors, trying door-knobs until I found one that opened. I had no idea what this room was used for normally, but it was located almost directly above the courtroom where Charlotte was right now.

I didn’t really believe in ESP or any of that crap, but I hoped she could feel me up here. Even more, I hoped that was a good thing.

Here was my secret: in spite of the fact that I had defected to the other side, in spite of the fact that my marriage had crashed on the rocks, there was a part of me that wondered what would happen if Charlotte won.

With enough money, we could send you to a camp this summer, so that you could meet other kids like you.

With enough money, we could buy a new van, instead of repairing the one that was seven years old with spit and glue.

With enough money, we could pay off our credit card debt and the second mortgage we’d taken out after the health insurance bills escalated.

With enough money, I could take Charlotte away for a night and fall in love with her again.

I truly believed that the cost of success for us shouldn’t be the cost of failure for a good friend. But what if we hadn’t known Piper personally, only professionally? Would I have endorsed a case like that against a different doctor? Was it Piper’s involvement I objected to-or the whole lawsuit?

There were so many things we hadn’t been told:

How it feels when a rib breaks, when I’m doing nothing more than cradling you.

How much it hurts to see the look on your face when you watch your older sister skating.

How even the people in a position to help have to cause pain first: the doctors who reset your bones, the folks who mold your leg braces by letting you play in them and get blisters, so that they know what to fix.

How your bones were not the only things that would break. There would be hairline cracks we would not see for years in my finances, my future, my marriage.

Suddenly I wanted to hear your voice. I took out my cell phone and started to dial, only to hear a loud beep as the battery died. I stared down at the receiver. I could go out to the car and get the charger, but that would mean running the gauntlet again. While I was weighing the costs and the benefits, the door to my sanctuary opened, and a slice of noise from the hallway slipped inside, followed by Piper Reece.

“You’ll have to find your own hiding place,” I said, and she jumped.

“You scared me to death,” Piper said. “How did you know that’s what I was doing?”

“Because it’s why I’m here. Shouldn’t you be in court?”

“We took a recess.”

I hesitated, then figured I had nothing to lose. “How’s it going in there?”

Piper opened her mouth, as if she were going to reply, and then shut it. “I’ll let you get back to your phone call,” she murmured, her hand on the doorknob.

“It’s dead,” I said, and she turned around. “My phone.”

She folded her arms. “Remember when there were no cell phones? When we didn’t have to listen to everyone’s conversations?”

“Some things are better left private,” I said.

Piper met my gaze. “It’s awful in there,” she admitted. “The last witness was an actuary who gave estimates on the out-of-pocket cost for Willow’s care, and the grand total, based on her life expectancy.”

“What did he say?”

“Thirty thousand annually.”

“No,” I said. “I meant, how long will she live?”

Piper hesitated. “I don’t like thinking of Willow in terms of numbers. Like she’s already a statistic.”

“Piper.”

“There’s no reason she won’t have a normal life expectancy,” Piper said.

“But not a normal life,” I finished.

Piper leaned against the wall. I had not turned the lights on-I didn’t want anyone to know I was in here, after all-and in the shadows her face looked lined and tired. “Last night I dreamed about the first time we had you over for dinner-to meet Charlotte.”

I could recall that night like it was yesterday. I had gotten lost on the way to Piper’s house because I was so nervous. For obvious reasons, I’d never before been invited to someone’s house after giving her a speeding ticket; and I wouldn’t have gone at all, but the day before pulling Piper’s car over for doing fifty in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone, I’d gone to the house of my best friend-another cop-and found my girlfriend in his bed. I had nothing to lose when Piper called the department a week later and asked; it was impulsive and stupid and desperate.