Jodie Picoult - My Sister's Keeper

This is the first time I've done it in the middle of the day.

I take a pack of Merits out of my pocket and tamp them down, then stick one into my mouth. My Zippo's almost out of lighter fluid; I need to remember to get some. When I'm finished, I get to my feet, take one last drag, and toss the cigarette into the sawdust. I know this one's going to move fast, so I'm already running when the wall of fire rises behind me. Like all the others, they will look for clues. But this cigarette and my initials will have long been gone. The whole floor underneath them will melt. The walls will buckle and give.

The first engine reaches the scene just as I get back to my car and Pull the binoculars out of my trunk. By then, the fire's done what it wants to—escape. Glass has blown out of windows; smoke rises black, an eclipse.

The first time I saw my mother cry I was five. She was standing at the kitchen window, pretending that she wasn't. The sun was just coming up, a swollen knot. "What are you doing?" I asked. It was not until years later that I realized I had heard her answer all wrong. That when she said mourning, she had not been talking about the time of day.

The sky, now, is thick and dark with smoke. Sparks shower as the roof falls in. A second crew of firefighters arrives, the ones who have been called in from their dinner tables and showers and living rooms. With the binoculars, I can make out his name, winking on the back of his turnout coat like it's spelled in diamonds. Fitzgerald. My father lays hands on a charged line, and I get into my car and drive away.

At home, my mother is having a nervous breakdown. She flies out the door as soon as I pull into my parking spot. "Thank God," she says. "I need your help."

She doesn't even look back to see if I'm following her inside, and that is how I know it's Kate. The door to my sisters' room has been kicked in, the wooden frame around it splintered. My sister lies still on her bed. Then all of a sudden she bursts to life, jerking up like a tire jack and puking blood. A stain spreads over her shirt and onto her flowered comforter, red poppies where there weren't any before.

My mother gets down beside her, holding back her hair and pressing a towel up to her mouth when Kate vomits again, another gush of blood. "Jesse," she says matter-of-factly, "your father's out on a call, and I can't reach him. I need you to drive us to the hospital, so that I can sit in the back with Kate."

Kate's lips are slick as cherries. I pick her up in my arms. She's nothing but bones, poking sharp through the skin of her T-shirt.

"When Anna ran off, Kate wouldn't let me into her room," my mother says, hurrying beside me. "I gave her a little while to calm down. And then I heard her coughing. I had to get in there."

So you kicked it down, I think, and it doesn't surprise me. We reach the car, and she opens the door so that I can slide Kate inside. I pull out of the driveway and speed even faster than normal through town, onto the highway, toward the hospital.

Today, when my parents were at court with Anna, Kate and I watched TV. She wanted to put on her soap and I told her fuck off and put on the scrambled Playboy channel instead. Now, as I run through red lights, I'm wishing that I'd let her watch that retarded soap. I'm trying not to look at her little white coin of a face in the rearview mirror. You'd think, with all the time I've had to get used to it, that moments like this wouldn't come as such a shock. The question we cannot ask pushes through my veins with each beat: Is this it? Is this it? Is this it?

The minute we hit the ER driveway, my mother's out of the car, hurrying me to get Kate. We are quite a picture walking through the automatic doors, me with Kate bleeding in my arms, and my mother grabbing the first nurse who walks by. "She needs platelets," my mother orders.

They take her away from me, and for a few moments, even after the ER team and my mother have disappeared with Kate behind closed curtains, I stand with my arms buoyed, trying to get used to the fact that there's no longer anything in them.

Dr. Chance, the oncologist I know, and Dr. Nguyen, some expert I don't, tell us what we've already figured out: these are the death throes of end-stage kidney disease. My mother stands next to the bed, her hand tight around Kate's IV pole. "Can you still do a transplant?" she asks, as if Anna never started her lawsuit, as if it means absolutely nothing.

"Kate's in a pretty grave clinical state," Dr. Chance tells her. "I told you before I didn't know if she was strong enough to survive that level of surgery; the odds are even slighter now."

"But if there was a donor," she says, "would you do it?”

“Wait." You'd think my throat had just been paved with straw. "Would mine work?"

Dr. Chance shakes his head. "A kidney donor doesn't have to be a perfect match, in an ordinary case. But your sister isn't an ordinary case."

When the doctors leave, I can feel my mother staring at me. "Jesse," she says.

"It wasn't like I was volunteering. I just wanted to, you know, know." But inside, I'm burning just as hot as I was when that fire caught at the warehouse. What made me believe I might be worth something, even now? What made me think I could save my sister, when I can't even save myself?

Kate's eyes open, so that she's staring right at me. She licks her lips—they're still caked with blood—and it makes her look like a vampire. The undead. If only.

I lean closer, because she doesn't have enough in her right now to make the words creep across the air between us. Tell, she mouths, so that my mother won't look up.

I answer, just as silent. Tell? l want to make sure I've got it right.

Tell Anna.

But the door to the room bursts open and my father fills the room with smoke. His hair and clothes and skin reek of it, so much so that I look up, expecting the sprinklers to go off. "What happened?" he asks, going right to the bed.

I slip out of the room, because nobody needs me there anymore. In the elevator, in front of the NO SMOKING sign, I light a cigarette.

Tell Anna what?

-1991

BY PURE CHANCE, or maybe karmic distribution, all three clients at the hair salon are pregnant. We sit under the dryers, hands folded over our bellies like a row of Buddhas. "My top choices are Freedom, Low, and Jack," says the girl next to me, who is getting her hair dyed pink.

"What if it's not a boy?" asks the woman sitting on my other side.

"Oh, those are meant to be for either ."

I hide a smile. "I vote for Jack."

The girl squints, looking out the window at the rotten weather. "Sleet is nice," she says absently, and then tries it on for size. "Sleet, pick up your toys. Sleet, honey, come on, or we're gonna be late for the Uncle Tupelo concert." She digs a piece of paper and a pencil stub out of her maternity overalls and scribbles down the name.

The woman on my left grins at me. "Is this your first?"

"My third."

"Mine too. I have two boys. I'm keeping my fingers crossed."

"I have a boy and a girl," I tell her. "Five and three."

"Do you know what you're having this time?"

I know everything about this baby, from her sex to the very placement of her chromosomes, including the ones that make her a perfect match for Kate. I know exactly what I am having: a miracle. "It's a girl," I answer.

"Ooh, I'm so jealous! My husband and I, we didn't find out at the ultrasound. I thought if I heard it was another boy, I might never finish out the last five months." She shuts off her hair dryer and pushes it back. "You have any names picked?"

It strikes me that I don't. Although I am nine months pregnant, although I have had plenty of time to dream, I have not really considered the specifics of this child. I have thought of this daughter only in terms of what she will be able to do for the daughter I already have. I haven't admitted this even to Brian, who lies at night with his head on my considerable belly, waiting for the twitches that herald—he thinks—the first female placekicker for the Patriots. Then again, my dreams for her are no less exalted; I plan for her to save her sister's life.