Jodie Picoult - My Sister's Keeper

"What are you doing?" I ask.

"What you told me to." She looks down at the dog. "Hey, Judge."

"Line two for you," Kerri interrupts. I give her a measured look—why she even let this kid in here is beyond me—and try to get into my office, but whatever Anna has put on the hardware makes it too greasy to turn. I struggle for a moment, until she grips the knob with the cloth and opens the door for me.

Judge circles the floor, finding the most comfortable spot. I punch the blinking light on the call row. "Campbell Alexander."

"Mr. Alexander, this is Sara Fitzgerald. Anna Fitzgerald's mother." I let this information settle. I stare at her daughter, polishing a mere five feet away.

"Mrs. Fitzgerald," I answer, and as expected, Anna stops in her tracks.

"I'm calling because… well, you see, this is all a misunderstanding."

"Have you filed a response to the petition?"

"That isn't going to be necessary. I spoke to Anna last night, and she isn't going to continue with her case. She wants to do anything she can to help Kate."

"Is that so." My voice falls flat. "Unfortunately, if my client is planning to call off her lawsuit, I'll need to hear it directly from her." I raise a brow, catch Anna's gaze. "You wouldn't happen to know where she is?"

"She went out for a run," Sara Fitzgerald says. "But we're going to come down to the courthouse this afternoon. We'll talk to the judge, and get this straightened out."

"I suppose I'll see you then." I hang up the phone and cross my arms, look at Anna. "Is there something you'd like to tell me?"

She shrugs. "Not really."

"That's not what your mother seems to think. Then again, she's also under the impression that you're out playing Flo Jo."

Anna glances out into the reception area, where Kerri, naturally, is hanging on our words like a cat on a rope. She closes the door and walks up to my desk. "I couldn't tell her I was coming here, not after last night."

"What happened last night?" When Anna goes mute, I lose my patience. "Listen. If you're not going to go through with a lawsuit… if this is a colossal waste of my time… then I'd appreciate it if you had the honesty to tell me now, rather than later. Because I'm not a family therapist or your best buddy; I'm your attorney. And for me to be your attorney there actually has to be a case. So I will ask you one more time: have you changed your mind about this lawsuit?"

I expect this tirade to put an end to the litigation, to reduce Anna to a wavering puddle of indecision. But to my surprise, she looks right at me, cool and collected. "Are you still willing to represent me?" she asks.

Against my better judgment, I say yes.

"Then no," she says, "I haven't changed my mind."

The first time I sailed in a yacht club race with my father I was fourteen, and he was dead set against it. I wasn't old enough; I wasn't mature enough; the weather was too iffy. What he really was saying was that having me crew for him was more likely to lose him the cup than to win it. In my father's eyes, if you weren't perfect, you simply weren't.

His boat was a USA-1 class, a marvel of mahogany and teak, one he'd bought from the keyboard player J. Geils up in Marblehead. In other words: a dream, a status symbol, and a rite of passage, all wrapped up in a gleaming white sail and a honey-colored hull.

We hit the start dead-on, crossing the line at full sail just as the cannon shot off. I did my best to be a step ahead of where my father needed me to be—guiding the rudder before he even gave the order, jibing and tacking until my muscles burned with effort. And maybe this even would have had a happy ending, but then a storm blew in from the north, bringing sheets of rain and swells that stretched ten feet high, pitching us from height to gulley.

I watched my father move in his yellow slicker. He didn't seem to notice it was raining; he certainly didn't want to crawl into a hole and clutch his sick stomach and die, like I did. "Campbell," he bellowed, "come about."

But to turn into the wind meant to ride another roller coaster up and down. "Campbell," my father repeated, "now."

A trough opened up in front of us; the boat dipped so sharply I lost my footing. My father lunged past me, grabbing for the rudder. For one blessed moment, the sails went still. Then the boom whipped across, and the boat tacked along an opposite course.

"I need coordinates," my father ordered.

Navigating meant going down into the hull where the charts were, and doing the math to figure out what heading we had to be on to reach the next race buoy. But being below, away from the fresh air, only made it worse. I opened a map just in time to throw up all over it.

My father found me by default, because I hadn't returned with an answer. He poked his head down and saw me sitting in a puddle of my own vomit. "For Christ's sake," he muttered, and left me.

It took all the strength I had to pull myself up after him. He jerked the wheel and yanked at the rudder. He pretended I was not there. And when he jibed, he did not call it. The sail whizzed across the boat, ripping the seam of the sky. The boom flew, clipped me on the back of the head and knocked me out.

I came to just as my father was stealing the wind of another boat, mere feet from the finish line. The rain had mellowed to a mist, and as he put our craft between the airstream and our closest competitor, the other boat fell back. We won by seconds.

I was told to clean up my mess and take the taxi in, while my father sailed the dory to the yacht club to celebrate. It was an hour later when I finally arrived, and by then he was in high spirits, drinking scotch from the crystal cup he had won. "Here comes your crew, Cam," a friend called out. My father lifted the victory cup in salute, drank deeply, and then slammed it down so hard on the bar that its handle shattered.

"Oh," said another sailor. "That's a shame."

My father never took his eyes off me. "Isn't it, though," he said.

On the rear bumper of practically every third car in Rhode Island you'll find a red-and-white sticker celebrating the victims of some of the bigger criminal cases in the state: My Friend Katie DeCubellis Was Killed by a Drunk Driver. My Friend John Sisson Was Killed by a Drunk Driver. These are given out at school fairs and fund-raisers and hair salons, and it doesn't matter if you never knew the kid who got killed; you put them on your vehicle out of solidarity and secret joy that this tragedy did not happen to you.

Last year, there were red-and-white stickers with a new victim's name: Dena DeSalvo. Unlike the other victims, this was one I knew marginally. She was the twelve-year-old daughter of a judge, who reportedly broke down during a custody trial held shortly after the funeral and took a three-month leave of absence to deal with his grief. The same judge, incidentally, who has been assigned to Anna Fitzgerald's case.

As I make my way into the Garrahy Complex, where the family court is housed, I wonder if a man carrying around so much baggage will be able to try a case where a winning outcome for my client will precipitate the death of her teenage sister.

There is a new bailiff at the entrance, a man with a neck as thick as a redwood and most likely the brainpower to match. "Sorry," he says. "No pets."

"This is a service dog."

Confused, the bailiff leans forward and peers into my eyes. I do the same, right back at him. "I'm nearsighted. He helps me read the road signs." Stepping around the guy, Judge and I head down the hall to the courtroom.

Inside, the clerk is being taken down a peg by Anna Fitzgerald's mother. That's my assumption, at least, because in actuality the woman looks nothing like her daughter, who stands beside her. "I'm quite sure that in this case, the judge would understand," Sara Fitzgerald argues. Her husband waits a few feet behind her, apart.