Jodie Picoult - My Sister's Keeper

In my second dream, I am in a maternity ward, giving birth. My body tunnels in, my heart pulses low in my belly. There is a rush of pressure, and then the baby arrives in a lightning rush and flow. "It's a girl," the nurse beams, and she hands me the newborn.

I pull the pink blanket from her face, then stop. "This isn't Kate," I say.

"Of course not," the nurse agrees. "But she's still yours."

The angel that arrives is wearing Armani and barking into a cell phone as she enters the hospital room. "Sell it," my sister orders. "I don't care if you have to set up a lemonade stand in Fanueil Hall and give the shares away, Peter. I said sell." She pushes a button and holds out her arms to me. "Hey," Zanne soothes when I burst into tears. "Did you really think I'd listen to you when you told me not to come?"

"But—"

"Faxes. Phones. I can work from your home. Who else is going to watch Jesse?"

Brian and I look at each other; we haven't thought that far. In response, Brian stands up, hugs Zanne awkwardly. Jesse runs toward her at full tilt. "Who's that kid you adopted, Sara… because Jesse can't possibly be that big…" She disengages Jesse from her knees and leans down over the hospital bed, where Kate is sleeping. "I bet you don't remember me," Zanne says, her eyes bright. "But I remember you."

It comes so easy—letting her take charge. Zanne gets Jesse involved in a game of tic-tac-toe and bullies a Chinese restaurant that doesn't deliver into bringing up lunch. I sit beside Kate, basking in my sister's competence. I let myself pretend she can fix the things I can't.

After Zanne takes Jesse home for the night, Brian and I become bookends in the dark, bracketing Kate. "Brian," I whisper. "I've been thinking."

He shifts in his seat. "What about?"

I lean forward, so that I catch his eye. "Having a baby."

Brian's eyes narrow. "Jesus, Sara." He gets to his feet, turns his back to me. "Jesus."

I stand up, too. "It's not what you think."

When he faces me, pain draws every line of his features tight. "We can't just replace Kate if she dies," he says.

In the hospital bed, Kate shifts, rustling the sheets. I force myself to imagine her at age four, wearing a Halloween costume; age twelve, trying out lip gloss; age twenty, dancing around a dorm room. "I know. So we have to make sure that she doesn't."

WE ARE ALL, I SUPPOSE, beholden to our parents—the question is, how much? This is what runs through my mind while my mother jabbers on about my father's latest affair. Not for the first time, I wish for siblings—if only so that I would receive sunrise phone calls like this only once or twice a week, instead of seven.

"Mother," I interrupt, "I doubt that she's actually sixteen."

"You underestimate your father, Campbell."

Maybe, but I also know that he's a federal judge. He may leer after schoolgirls, but he'd never do anything illegal. "Mom, I'm late for court. I'll check back in with you later," I say, and I hang up before she can protest.

I am not going to court, but still. Taking a deep breath, I shake my head and find Judge staring at me. "Reason number 106 why dogs are smarter than humans," I say. "Once you leave the litter, you sever contact with your mothers."

I walk into the kitchen as I am knotting my tie. My apartment, it is a work of art. Sleek and minimalist, but what is there is the best that money can buy—a one-of-a-kind black leather couch; a flat screen television hanging on the wall; a locked glass case filled with signed first editions from authors like Hemingway and Hawthorne. My coffeemaker comes imported from Italy; my refrigerator is subzero. I open it and find a single onion, a bottle of ketchup, and three rolls of black-and-white film.

This, too, is no surprise—I rarely eat at home. Judge is so used to restaurant food he wouldn't recognize kibble if it slid its way down his throat. "What do you think?" I ask him. "Rosie's sound good?"

He barks as I fasten his service-dog harness. Judge and I have been together for seven years. I bought him from a breeder of police dogs, but he was specially trained with me in mind. As for his name, well, what attorney wouldn't want to be able to put a Judge in a crate every now and then?

Rosie's is what Starbucks wishes it was: eclectic and funky, crammed with patrons who at any time might be reading Russian lit in its original tongue or balancing a company's budget on a laptop or writing a screenplay while mainlining caffeine. Judge and I usually walk there and sit at our usual table, in the back. We order a double espresso and two chocolate croissants, and we flirt shamelessly with Ophelia, the twenty-year-old waitress. But today, when we walk inside, Ophelia is nowhere to be found and there is a woman sitting at our table, feeding a toddler in a stroller a bagel. This throws me for such a loop that Judge needs to tug me to the only spot that's free, a stool at the counter that looks out on the street.

Seven-thirty A.M., and already this day is a bust.

A heroin-thin boy with enough rings in his eyebrows to resemble a shower curtain rod approaches with a pad. He sees Judge at my feet. "Sorry, dude. No dogs allowed."

"This is a service dog," I explain. "Where's Ophelia?"

"She's gone, man. Eloped, last night."

Eloped? People still do that? "With whom?" I ask, though it's none of my business.

"Some performance artist who sculpts dog crap into busts of world leaders. It's supposed to be a statement."

I feel a momentary pang for poor Ophelia. Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow—beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.

The waiter reaches into his back pocket and hands me a plastic card. "Here's the Braille menu."

"I want a double espresso and two croissants, and I'm not blind."

"Then what's Fido for?"

"I have SARS," I say. "He's tallying the people I infect."

The waiter can't seem to figure out if I am joking. He backs away, unsure, to get my coffee.

Unlike my normal table, this one has a view of the street. I watch an elderly lady narrowly avoid the swipe of a taxi; a boy dances past with a radio three times the size of his head balanced on his shoulder. Twins in parochial school uniforms giggle behind the pages of a teen magazine. And a woman with a running river of black hair spills coffee on her skirt, dropping the paper cup on the pavement.

Inside me, everything stops. I wait for her to lift her face—to see if this could possibly be who I think it is—but she turns away from me, blotting the fabric with a napkin. A bus cuts the world in half, and my cell phone begins to ring.

I glance down at the incoming number: no surprise there. Turning off the power button without bothering to take my mother's call, I glance back at the woman outside the window, but by then the bus is gone and so is she.

I open the door of the office, already barking orders for Kerri. "Call Osterlitz and ask him whether he's available to testify during the Weiland trial; get a list of other complainants who've gone up against New England Power in the past five years; make me a copy of the Melbourne deposition; and phone Jerry at the court and ask who the judge is going to be for the Fitzgerald kid's hearing."

She glances up at me as the phone begins to ring. "Speaking of." She jerks her head in the direction of the door to my inner sanctum. Anna Fitzgerald stands on the threshold with a spray can of industrial cleaner and a chamois cloth, polishing the doorknob.