Jodie Picoult: My Sister's Keeper

"Then what?"

"There will be a hearing, and the judge will appoint a guardian ad litem, which is—"

"—a person trained to work with kids in the family court, who determines what's in the child's best interests," Anna recites. "Or in other words, just another grown-up deciding what happens to me."

"Well, that's the way the law works, and you can't get around it. But a GAL is theoretically only looking out for you, not your sister or your parents."

She watches me take out a legal pad and scrawl a few notes. "Does it bother you that your name is backward?"

"What?" I stop writing, and stare at her.

"Campbell Alexander. Your last name is a first name, and your first name is a last name." She pauses. "Or a soup."

"And how does that have any bearing on your case?"

"It doesn't," Anna admits, "except that it was a pretty bad decision your parents made for you."

I reach across my desk to hand her a card. "If you have any questions, call me."

She takes it, and runs her fingers over the raised lettering of my name. My backward name. For the love of God. Then she leans across the desk, grabs my pad, and tears the bottom off the page. Borrowing my pen, she writes something down and hands it back to me. I glance down at the note in my hand:

ANNA 555-3211

"If you have any questions," she says.

When I walk out to the reception area, Anna is gone and Kerri sits at her desk, a catalog spread-eagled across it. "Did you know they used to use those L. L. Bean canvas bags to carry ice?"

"Yeah." And vodka and Bloody Mary mix. Toted from the cottage to the beach every Saturday morning. Which reminds me, my mother called.

Kerri has an aunt who makes her living as a psychic, and every now and then this genetic predisposition rears its head. Or maybe she's just been working for me long enough to know most of my secrets. At any rate, she knows what I am thinking. "She says your father's taken up with a seventeen-year-old and that discretion isn't in his vocabulary and that she's checking herself into The Pines unless you call her by…" Kerri glances at her watch. "Oops."

"How many times has she threatened to commit herself this week?"

"Only three," Kerri says.

"We're still way below average." I lean over the desk and close the catalog. "Time to earn a living, Ms. Donatelli."

"What's going on?"

"That girl, Anna Fitzgerald—"

"Planned Parenthood?"

"Not quite," I say. "We're representing her. I need to dictate a petition for medical emancipation, so that you can file it with the family court by tomorrow."

"Get out ! You're representing her?"

I put a hand over my heart. "I'm wounded that you think so little of me."

"Actually, I was thinking about your wallet. Do her parents know?'

"They will by tomorrow."

"Are you a complete idiot?"

"Excuse me?"

Kerri shakes her head. "Where's she going to live?"

The comment stops me. In fact, I hadn't really considered it. But a girl who brings a lawsuit against her parents will not be particularly comfortable residing under the same roof, once the papers are served.

Suddenly Judge is at my side, pushing against my thigh with his nose. I shake my head, annoyed. Timing is everything. "Give me fifteen minutes," I tell Kerri. "I'll call you when I'm ready."

"Campbell," Kerri presses, relentless, "you can't expect a kid to fend for herself."

I head back into my office. Judge follows, pausing just inside the threshold. "It's not my problem," I say; and then I close the door, lock it securely, and wait.

THE BRUISE IS THE SIZE AND SHAPE of a four-leaf clover, and sits square between Kate's shoulder blades. Jesse is the one to find it, while they are both in the bathtub. "Mommy," he asks, "does that mean she's lucky?"

I try to rub it off first, assuming it's dirt, without success. Kate, two, the subject of scrutiny, stares up at me with her china blue eyes. "Does it hurt?" I ask her, and she shakes her head.

Somewhere in the hallway behind me, Brian is telling me about his day. He smells faintly of smoke. "So the guy bought a case of expensive cigars," he says, "and had them insured against fire for $15,000. Next thing you know, the insurance company gets a claim, saying all the cigars were lost in a series of small fires."

"He smoked them?" I say, washing the soap out of Jesse's hair.

Brian leans against the threshold of the door. "Yeah. But the judge ruled that the company guaranteed the cigars as insurable against fire, without defining acceptable fire."

"Hey, Kate, does it hurt now?" Jesse says, and he presses his thumb, hard, against the bruise on his sister's spine.

Kate howls, lurches, and spills bathwater all over me. I lift her out of the water, slick as a fish, and pass her over to Brian. Pale towheads bent together, they are a matched set. Jesse looks more like me—skinny, dark, cerebral. Brian says this is how we know our family is complete: we each have our clone. "You get yourself out of the tub this minute," I tell Jesse.

He stands up, a sluice of four-year-old boy, and manages to trip as he navigates the wide lip of the tub. He smacks his knee hard, and bursts into tears.

I gather Jesse into a towel, soothing him as I try to continue my conversation with my husband. This is the language of a marriage: Morse code, punctuated by baths and dinners and stories before bed. "So who subpoenaed you?" I ask Brian. "The defendant?"

"The prosecution. The insurance company paid out the money, and then had him arrested for twenty-four counts of arson. I got to be their expert."

Brian, a career firefighter, can walk into a blackened structure and find the spot where the flames began: a charred cigarette butt, an exposed wire. Every holocaust starts with an ember. You just have to know what to look for.

"The judge threw out the case, right?"

"The judge sentenced him to twenty-four consecutive one-year terms," Brian says. He puts Kate down on the floor and begins to pull her pajamas over her head.

In my previous life, I was a civil attorney. At one point I truly believed that was what I wanted to be—but that was before I'd been handed a fistful of crushed violets from a toddler. Before I understood that the smile of a child is a tattoo: indelible art.

It drives my sister Suzanne crazy. She's a finance whiz who decimated the glass ceiling at the Bank of Boston, and according to her, I am a waste of cerebral evolution. But I think half the battle is figuring out what works for you, and I am much better at being a mother than I ever would have been as a lawyer. I sometimes wonder if it is just me, or if there are other women who figure out where they are supposed to be by going nowhere.

I look up from drying Jesse off, and find Brian staring at me. "Do you miss it, Sara?" he asks quietly.

I wrap our son in the towel and kiss him on the crown of his head. "Like I'd miss a root canal," I say.

By the time I wake up the next morning, Brian has already left for work. He's on two days, then two nights, and then off for four, before the cycle repeats again. Glancing at the clock, I realize I've slept past nine. More amazingly, my children have not woken me up. In my bathrobe, I run downstairs, where I find Jesse playing on the floor with blocks. "I eated breakfast," he informs me. "I made some for you, too."

Sure enough, there is cereal spilled all over the kitchen table, and a frighteningly precarious chair poised beneath the cabinet that holds the corn flakes. A trail of milk leads from the refrigerator to the bowl. "Where's Kate?"

"Sleeping," Jesse says. "I tried poking her and everything."

My children are a natural alarm clock; the thought of Kate sleeping so late makes me remember that she's been sniffling lately, and then wonder if that's why she was so tired last night. I walk upstairs, calling her name loud. In her bedroom, she rolls toward me, swimming up from the dark to focus on my face.