Jodie Picoult - My Sister's Keeper

Kate looks at me, and then down at all the tubes that anchor her to the bed. So I get up and walk toward my mother. I put a hand on her shoulder. "Mom," I say. "Stop."

She lifts her head and looks at me with haunted eyes. "No, Anna. You stop."

It takes me a little while, but I break away. "Anna," I murmur.

My mother turns. "What?"

"A four-letter word for vessel," I say, and I walk out of Kate's room.

Later that afternoon, I'm turning in circles on the swivel chair in my dad's office at the fire station, with Julia sitting across from me. On the desk are a half-dozen pictures of my family. There's one with Kate as a baby, wearing a knit hat that looks like a strawberry. Another with Jesse and me, grinning just as wide as the bluefish balanced between our hands. I used to wonder about the fake pictures that came in frames you buy at the store—ladies with smooth brown hair and show-me smiles, grapefruit-headed babies on their sibling's knees—people who in real life probably were strangers brought together by a talent scout to be a phony family.

Maybe it's not so different from real photos, after all.

I pick up one picture that shows my mother and father looking tanned and younger than I can ever remember them being. "Do you have a boyfriend?" I ask Julia.

"No!" she says, way too fast. When I glance up, she just sort of shrugs. "Do you?"

"There's this one guy, Kyle McFee, that I thought I liked but now I'm not sure." I pick up a pen and start to unscrew the whole thing, pull out the skinny little tube of blue ink. It would be so cool to have one of these built inside you, like a squid; you could point your finger and leave your mark on anything you wanted.

"What happened?"

"I went to a movie with him, like on a date, and when it was over and we stood up he was—" I turn bright red. "Well, you know." I wave in the general vicinity of my lap.

"Ah," Julia says.

"He asked me whether I'd ever taken wood shop at school—I mean, God, wood shop?—and I go to tell him no and bam, I'm staring right there." I put the decapitated pen down on my dad's blotter. "When I see him now around town it's all I can think about." I stare up at her, a thought coming at me. "Am I a pervert?"

"No, you're thirteen. And for the record, so is Kyle. He couldn't help it happening any more than you can help thinking about it when you see him. My brother Anthony used to say there were only two times a guy could get excited: during the day, and during the night."

"Your brother used to talk to you about stuff like that?"

She laughs. "I guess so. Why, wouldn't Jesse?"

I snort. "If I asked Jesse a question about sex, he'd laugh so hard he'd bust a rib, and then he'd give me a stash of Playboys and tell me to do research."

"How about your parents?"

I shake my head. My dad is out of the question—because he's my dad. My mom's too distracted. And Kate is in the same clueless boat I'm in. "Did you and your sister ever fight over the same guy?"

"Actually, we don't go for the same type."

“What's your type?"

She thinks about it. "I don't know. Tall. Dark-haired. Breathing."

"Do you think Campbell's cute?"

Julia nearly falls out of her chair. "What?"

"Well, I mean, for an older guy ."

"I could see where some women… might find him attractive," she says.

"He looks like a character on one of the soaps that Kate likes." I run my thumbnail into the groove of wood on the desk. "It's weird. That I get to grow up and kiss someone and get married."

And Kate doesn't.

Julia leans forward. "What's going to happen if your sister dies, Anna?"

One of the pictures on the desk is of me and Kate. We are little—maybe five and two. It is before her first relapse, but after her hair grew back. We're standing on the edge of a beach, wearing matching bathing suits, playing patty-cake. You could fold this picture in half and think it was a mirror image—Kate small for her age and me tall; Kate's hair a different color but with the same natural part and flip at the bottom; Kate's hands pressed up against mine. Until now, I don't think I've really realized how much alike we are.

The phone rings just before ten o'clock that night, and to my surprise it's my name that's paged throughout the firehouse. I pick up the extension in the kitchen area, which has been cleaned and mopped for the night. "Hello?"

"Anna," my mother says.

Immediately, I assume she's calling about Kate. There isn't much else for her to say to me, given the way we left things earlier at the hospital. "Is everything okay?"

"Kate's asleep."

"That's good," I reply, and then wonder if it really is.

"I called for two reasons. The first is to say that I'm sorry about this morning."

I feel very small. "Me too," I admit. In that minute, I remember how she used to tuck me in at night. She'd go to Kate's bed first, and lean down, and announce that she was kissing Anna. And then she'd come to my bed and say she'd come to hug Kate. Every time, it cracked us up. She'd turn off the light, and for long moments after she left, the room still smelled of the lotion she used on her skin to keep it as soft as the inside of a flannel pillowcase.

"The second reason I called," my mother says, "was just to say good night."

"That's all?"

In her voice, I can hear a smile. "Isn't that enough?"

"Sure," I tell her, although it isn't.

Because I can't fall asleep, I slip out of my bed at the fire station, past my father, who's snoring. I steal the Guinness Book of World Records from the men's room and lie down on the roof of the station to read by moonlight. An eighteen-month-old baby named Alejandro fell 65 feet 7 inches from the window of his parents' apartment in Murcia, Spain, and became the infant to survive the longest fall. Roy Sullivan, of Virginia, survived seven lightning strikes, only to commit suicide after being spurned by a lover. A cat was found in rubble eighty days after a Taiwanese earthquake that killed 2,000, and made a full recovery. I find myself reading and rereading the section called "Survivors and Lifesavers," adding listings in my head. Longest surviving APL patient, it would read. Most ecstatic sister.

My father finds me when I have put the book aside and started searching for Vega. "Can't see much tonight, huh?" he asks, taking a seat beside me. It is a night wrapped in clouds; even the moon seems covered with cotton.

"Nope," I say. "Everything's fuzzy."

"You try the telescope?"

I watch him fiddle with the scope for a while, and then decide that it's just not worth it tonight. I suddenly remember being about seven, riding beside him in the car, and asking him how grown-ups found their way to places. After all, I had never seen him pull out a map.

"I guess we just get used to taking the same turns," he said, but I wasn't satisfied.

"Then what about the first time you go somewhere?"

"Well," he said, "we get directions."

But what I want to know is who got them the very first time? What if no one's ever been where you're going? "Dad?" I ask, "is it true that you can use stars like a map?"

"Yeah, if you understand celestial navigation."

"Is it hard?" I'm thinking maybe I should learn. A backup plan, for all those times I feel like I'm just wandering in circles.

"It's pretty jazzy math—you have to measure the altitude of a star, figure out its position using a nautical almanac, figure out what you think the altitude should be and what direction the star should be in based on where you think you are, and compare the altitude you measured with the one you calculated. Then you plot this on a chart, as a (line of position. You get several lines of position to cross, and that's where you go." My father takes one look at my face and smiles. "Exactly," he laughs. "Never leave home without your GPS."