Jodie Picoult - My Sister's Keeper

"Dan, man, what's going on?" Granted, the guy is nuts, but still. I put my hand on his shoulder and you'd think, from his reaction, that a scorpion just landed there. "You scared of the fire, Danny? You don't have to be. We're far enough away. We're safe." I give him what I hope is an encouraging smile. What if he freaks out and starts screaming, calls down some wandering cop?

"That shed," Dan says.

"Yeah. No one's gonna miss it."

"That's where the rat lives."

"Not anymore," I answer.

"But the rat…"

"Animals make their own way out of a fire. I'm telling you. The rat will be totally cool. Chill."

"But what about the newspapers? He has one with President Kennedy's assassination…"

It occurs to me that the rat is most likely not a rodent, but another homeless guy. One using this shed as a shelter. "Dan, are you saying someone lives in there?"

He looks at the crowning flames and his eyes fill. Then he repeats my own words. "Not anymore," he says.

Like I said, I was eleven, so even to this day I can't tell you how I made my way from our house in Upper Darby to the middle of downtown Providence. I suppose it took me a few hours; I suppose I believed that with my new superhero's cloak of invisibility, maybe I could just disappear and reappear somewhere else entirely.

I tested myself. I walked through the business district, and sure enough, people passed right by me, their eyes on the cracks of the pavement or staring straight ahead like corporate zombies. I walked by a long wall of mirrored glass on the side of a building, where I could see myself. But no matter how many faces I made, no matter how long I stood there, none of the people funneling around me had anything to say.

I wound up that day at the middle of an intersection, smack under the traffic light, with taxis honking and a car swerving off to the left and a pair of cops running to keep me from getting killed. At the police station, when my dad came to get me, he asked what the hell I'd been thinking.

I hadn't been thinking, actually. I was just trying to get to a place where I'd be noticed.

First I take off my shirt and dunk it into a puddle on the side of the road; then wrap it around my head and face. The smoke is already billowing, angry black clouds. In the hollow of my ear Is the sound of sirens. But I have made a promise to Dan.

What hits me first is the heat, a wall that's way more solid than it looks. The frame of the shed stands out, an orange X ray. Inside, I can't see a foot in front of me.

"Rat," I yell out, already regretting the smoke that leaves me raw-throated and hoarse. "Rat!"

No answer. But the shed isn't all that big. I get down on my hands and knees and begin to feel my way around.

I only have one really bad moment, when I put my hand down by accident on something that was made of metal before it became a searing brand. My skin sticks to it, blisters immediately. By the time I fall over a booted foot I'm sobbing, sure I will never get out. I feel my way up Rat, haul his limp body over my shoulder, stagger back the way I came.

Through some little joke of God, we make it outside. By now, the engines are pulling up, charging their lines. Maybe my father is even here. I stay under the screen of smoke; I dump Rat on the ground. With my heart racing, I run in the other direction; leaving the rest of this rescue to people who actually want to be heroes.

Did you ever wonder how we all got here? On Earth, I mean. Forget the song and dance about Adam and Eve, which I know is a load of crap. My father likes the myth of the Pawnee Indians, who say that the star deities populated the world: Evening Star and Morning Star hooked up and gave birth to the first female. The first boy came from the Sun and the Moon. Humans rode in on the back of a tornado.

Mr. Hume, my science teacher, taught us about this primordial soup full of natural gases and muddy slop and carbon matter that somehow solidified into one-celled organisms called choanoflagellates . . . which sound a lot more like a sexually transmitted disease than the start of the evolutionary chain, in my opinion. But even once you get there, it's a huge leap from an amoeba to a monkey to a whole thinking person.

The really amazing thing about all this is no matter what you believe, it took some doing to get from a point where there was nothing, to a point where all the right neurons fire and pop so that we can make decisions.

More amazing is how even though that's become second nature, we all still manage to screw it up.

On Saturday morning, I am at the hospital with Kate and my mother, all of us doing our best to pretend that two days from now, my trial won't begin. You'd think this is hard, but actually, it's much easier than the alternative. My family is famous for lying to ourselves by omission: if we don't talk about it, then— presto! —there's no more lawsuit, no more kidney failure, no worries at all.

I'm watching Happy Days on the TVLand channel. Those Cunninghams, they're not so different from us. All they ever seem to worry about is whether Richie's band will be hired at Al's place, or if Fonzie will win the kissing contest, when even I know that in the '50s Joanie should have been having air raid drills at school and Marion was probably popping Valium and Howard would have been freaking out about commie attacks. Maybe if you spend your life pretending you're on a movie set, you don't ever have to admit that the walls are made out of paper and the food is plastic and the words in your mouth aren't really yours.

Kate is trying to do a crossword puzzle. "What's a four-letter word for vessel?" she asks.

Today is a good day. By this I mean she feels up to yelling at me for borrowing two of her CDs without asking (for God's sake, she was practically comatose; it isn't like she would have been able to give her permission); she feels up to trying this crossword.

"Vat," I suggest. "Urn."

" Four letters."

"Ship," my mother offers. "Maybe they're thinking of that kind."

"Blood," Dr. Chance says, coming into the room.

"That's five letters," Kate replies, in a tone that's much more pleasant than the one she used with me, I might add.

We all like Dr. Chance; by now, he might as well be the sixth member of our family.

"Give me a number." He means on the pain scale. "Five?"

"Three."

Dr. Chance sits down on the edge of her bed. "It may be a five in an hour," he cautions. "It may be a nine."

My mother's face has gone the color of an eggplant. "But Kate's feeling great right now!" she cheerleads.

"I know. But the lucid moments, they're going to get briefer and further apart," Dr. Chance explains. "This isn't the APL. This is renal failure."

"But after a transplant—" my mother says.

All the air in the room, I swear, turns into a sponge. You'd be able to hear a hummingbird's wings, that's how quiet it gets. I want to slink out of the room like mist; I don't want this to be my fault.

Dr. Chance is the only one brave enough to look at me. "As I understand it, Sara, the availability of an organ is under debate."

"But—"

"Mom," Kate interrupts. She turns to Dr. Chance. "How long are we talking about?"

"A week, maybe."

"Wow," she says softly. "Wow." She touches the edge of the newspaper, rubs her thumb over the point at its edge. "Will it hurt?"

"No," Dr. Chance promises. "I will make sure of that."

Kate lays the paper in her lap and touches his arm. "Thanks. For the truth, I mean."

When Dr. Chance looks up, his eyes are red-rimmed. "Don't thank me." He gets up so heavily that I think he must be made of stone, and leaves the room without speaking another word.

My mother, she folds into herself, that's the only way to explain it. Like paper, when you put it deep into the fireplace, and instead of burning, it simply seems to vanish.