Jodie Picoult - My Sister's Keeper

A male nurse taps her thin wrists. "Jesus."

'Yeah, that's why I couldn't get a line. I needed pedi cuffs to get her pressure."

Suddenly I remember Anna, who's standing wide-eyed in the doorway.

"Daddy? Is that lady going to die?"

"I think she might have had a stroke… but she's going to make it. Listen, why don't you just go wait over there, in a chair? I'll be out in five minutes, tops."

"Dad?" she says, and I pause at the threshold. "Wouldn't it be cool if they were all that way?"

She doesn't see it the way I do—that Eldie Briggs is a paramedic's nightmare, that her veins are shot and her condition's waffling and that this has not been a good call at all. What Anna means is that whatever is wrong with Eldie Briggs can be fixed.

I go inside and continue to feed information to the ER staff as needed. About ten minutes later, I finish up my Run Form and look for my daughter in the waiting area, but she's gone missing. I find Red smoothing fresh sheets onto the stretcher, strapping a pillow under its belt. "Where's Anna?"

"1 figured she was with you."

Glancing down one hallway and then the other, all I see are weary physicians, other paramedics, small scatterings of dazed people sipping coffee and hoping for the best. "I'll be right back."

Compared to the frenzy of the ER, the eighth floor is all tucked tight. The nurses all greet me by name as I head for Kate's room and gently push open the door.

Anna is too big for Sara's lap, but that's where she's sitting. She and Kate are both asleep. Over the crown of Anna's head, Sara watches me approach.

I kneel in front of my wife and brush Anna's hair off her temples. "Baby," I whisper, "it's time to go home."

Anna sits up slowly. She lets me take her hand and draw her upright, Sara's palm trailing down her spine. "It's not home," Anna says, but she follows me out of the room all the same.

Past midnight, I lean down beside Anna and balance my words on the edge of her ear. "Come see this," I coax. She sits up, grabs a sweatshirt, stuffs her feet into her sneakers. Together, we climb to the station's roof.

The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark. "Oh!" Anna exclaims, and she lies down so that she can see better.

"It's the Perseids," I tell her. "A meteor shower."

"It's incredible."

Shooting stars are not stars at all. They're just rocks that enter the atmosphere and catch fire under friction. What we wish on, when we see one, is only a trail of debris.

In the upper left quadrant of the sky, a radiant bursts in a new stream of sparks. "Is it like this every night, while we're asleep?" Anna asks.

It is a remarkable question—Do all the wonderful things happen when we are not aware of them? I shake my head. Technically, the earth's path crosses this comet's gritty tail once a year. But a show as dynamic as this one might be once in a lifetime.

"Wouldn't it be cool if a star landed in the backyard? If we could find it when the sun came up and put it into a fishbowl and use it as a night-light or a camping lantern?" I can almost see her doing it, combing the lawn for the mark of burned grass. "Do you think Kate can see these, out her window?"

"I'm not sure." I come up on an elbow and look at her carefully.

But Anna keeps her eyes glued to the upended bowl of the heavens. "I know you want to ask me why I'm doing all this."

"You don't have to say anything if you don't want to."

Anna lies down, her head pillowed against my shoulder. Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas-a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak.

THE MINUTE I WALK INTO THE HOSPITAL with Judge at my side, I know I'm in trouble. A security officer—think Hitler in drag with a very bad perm—crosses her arms and blocks my entry at the elevator bank. "No dogs," she orders.

"This is a service dog."

"You're not blind."

"I have an irregular heartbeat and he's CPR certified."

I head up to the office of Dr. Peter Bergen, a psychiatrist who happens to be the chairman of the medical ethics board at Providence Hospital. I'm here by default: I can't seem to find my client, who may or may not still be pursuing her lawsuit. Frankly, after the hearing yesterday I was pissed off—I wanted her to come to me. When she didn't, I went so far as to sit on her doorstep last night for an hour, but no one showed up at her home; this morning, assuming Anna was with her sister, I came to the hospital—only to be told I couldn't go in to see Kate. I can't find Julia, either, although I fully expected to see her still waiting yesterday on the other side of the door when Judge and I left after the incident at the courthouse. I asked her sister for a cell number, at least, but something tells me that 401-GO2-HELL is out of service.

So, because I have nothing better to do, I'm going to work on my case on the off chance that it still exists.

Bergen's secretary looks like the kind of woman whose bra size ranks higher than her IQ. "Ooh, a puppy!" she squeals. She reaches out to pat Judge.

"Please. Don't." I start to come up with one of my ready replies, but why waste it on her? Then I head for the door in the back.

There I find a small, squat man with a stars-and-stripes bandanna over his graying curls, wearing yoga gear and doing Tai Chi. "Busy," Bergen grunts.

"Something we have in common, Doctor. I'm Campbell Alexander, the attorney who asked for the charts on the Fitzgerald girl."

Arms extended forward, the psychiatrist exhales. "I sent them over."

"You sent Kate Fitzgerald's records. I need Anna Fitzgerald's."

"You know," he replies, "now is not a very good time for me …"

"Don't let me interrupt your workout." I sit down, and Judge lies at my feet. "As I was saying—Anna Fitzgerald? Do you have any notes from the ethics committee about her?"

"The ethics committee has never convened on Anna Fitzgerald's behalf. It's her sister who's the patient."

I watch him arch his back, then hunch forward. "Do you have any idea how many times Anna's been both an outpatient and an inpatient in this hospital?"

"No," Bergen says.

"I'm counting eight."

"But those procedures wouldn't necessarily come before the ethics committee. When the physicians agree with what the patients want, and vice versa, there's no conflict. No reason for us to even hear about it." Dr. Bergen lowers the foot he has raised in the air and reaches for a towel to mop under his arms. "We all have full-time jobs, Mr. Alexander. We're psychiatrists and nurses and doctors and scientists and chaplains. We don't go looking for problems."

Julia and I leaned against my locker, having an argument about the Virgin Mary, I had been fingering her miraculous medal — well, actually, it was her collarbone I was after, and the medal had gotten in the way. "What if," I said, ''she was just some kid who got herself in trouble, and came up with an ingenious way out of it?"

Julia nearly choked, "I think they can even throw you out of the Episcopal Church for that one, Campbell."

"Think about it — you're thirteen, or however old they were back then when they were shacking up — and you have a nice little roll in the hay with Joseph, and before you know it your EPT is coming up positive. You can either face your father's wrath, or you can spin a good story. Who's going to contradict you if you say God's the one who knocked you up? Don't you think Mary's dad was thinking, 'I could ground her… but what if that causes a plague?' "