Jodie Picoult - My Sister's Keeper

We have been shopping for a prom dress for hours. Kate has only two days to prepare for this dance, and it has become an obsession: what she will wear, how she will do her makeup, if the band is going to play anything remotely decent. Her hair, of course, is not an issue; after chemo she lost it all. She hates wigs—they feel like bugs on her scalp, she says—but she's too self-conscious to go commando. Today, she has wrapped a batik scarf around her head, like a proud, pale African queen.

The reality of this outing hasn't matched Kate's dreams. Dresses that normal girls wear to proms bare the midriff or shoulders, where Kate's skin is riddled and thickened with scarring. They cling in all the wrong places. They are cut to showcase a healthy, hale body, not to hide the lack of it.

The saleswoman who hovers like a hummingbird takes the dress from Kate. "It's actually quite modest," she pushes. "It really does cover up a fair amount of cleavage."

"Will it cover this?" Kate snaps, popping open the buttons of her peasant blouse to reveal her recently replaced Hickman catheter, which sprouts from the center of her chest.

The saleswoman gasps before she can remember to stop herself. "Oh," she says faintly.

"Kate!" I scold.

She shakes her head. "Let's just get out of here."

As soon as we are on the street in front of the boutique I lace into her. "Just because you're angry, you don't have to take it out on the rest of the world."

"Well, she's a bitch," Kate retorts. "Did you see her looking at my scarf?"

"Maybe she just liked the pattern," I say dryly.

"Yeah, and maybe I'm going to wake up tomorrow and not be sick." Her words fall like boulders between us, cracking the sidewalk. "I'm not going to find a stupid dress. I don't know why I even told Taylor I'd go in the first place."

"Don't you think every other girl who's going to that dance is in the same boat? Trying to find gowns that cover up tubes and bruises and wires and colostomy bags and God knows what?"

"I don't care about anyone else," Kate says. "I wanted to look good. Really good, you know, for one night."

"Taylor already thinks you're beautiful."

"Well I don't!" Kate cries. "I don't, Mom, and maybe I want to just once."

It is a warm day, one where the ground beneath our feet seems to be breathing. The sun beats down on my head, on the back of my neck. What do I say to that? I have never been Kate. I have prayed and begged and wanted to be the one who's sick in lieu of her, some devil's Faustian bargain, but that is not the way it's happened.

"We'll sew something," I suggest. "You can design it."

"You don't know how to sew," Kate sighs.

"I'll learn."

"In a day?" She shakes her head. "You can't fix it every time, Mom. How come I know that, and you don't?"

She leaves me on the sidewalk and storms off. Anna runs after her, loops her arm through Kate's elbow, and drags her into a storefront a few feet away from the boutique, while I hurry to catch up.

It is a salon, filled with gum-cracking hairstylists. Kate is struggling to get away from Anna, but Anna, she can be strong when she wants to be. "Hey," Anna says, getting the attention of the receptionist. "Do you work here?"

"When I'm forced to."

"You guys do prom hairstyles?"

"Sure," the stylist says. "Like an updo?"

"Yeah. For my sister." Anna looks at Kate, who has stopped fighting. A smile glows slowly across her face, like a firefly caught in a jelly jar.

"That's right. For me," Kate says mischievously, and she unwinds the scarf from her bald head.

Everyone in the salon stops speaking. Kate stands regally straight. "We were thinking of French braids," Anna continues.

"A perm," Kate adds.

Anna giggles. "Maybe a nice chignon."

The stylist swallows, caught between shock and sympathy and political correctness. "Well, um, we might be able to do something for you." She clears her throat. "There's always, you know, extensions."

"Extensions," Anna repeats, and Kate bursts out laughing.

The stylist begins to look behind the girls, toward the ceiling. "Is this like a Candid Camera thing?"

At that, my daughters collapse into each other's arms, hysterical. They laugh until they cannot catch their breath. They laugh until they cry.

As a chaperone at the Providence Hospital Prom, I am in charge of the punch. Like every other food item provided for the celebrants, it's neutropenic. The nurses—fairy godmothers for the night—have converted a conference room into a fantasy dance hall, complete with streamers and a disco ball and mood lighting.

Kate is a vine twined around Taylor. They sway to completely different music than the song that is playing. Kate wears her obligatory blue mask. Taylor has given her a corsage made of silk flowers, because real ones can carry diseases that immunocompromised patients can't fight off. In the end, I did not wind up sewing a dress; I found one online at Bluefly.com: a gold sheath, cut in a V for Kate's catheter. But over this is a long-sleeved, sheer shirt, one that wraps at the waist and glimmers when she turns this way and that so when you notice the strange triple tubing coming out by her breastbone, you wonder if it was only a trick of the light.

We took a thousand photos before leaving the house. When Kate and Taylor had escaped and were waiting for me in the car, I went to put the camera away and found Brian in the kitchen with his back to me. "Hey," I said. "You going to wave us off? Throw rice?"

It was only when he turned around that I realized he'd come in here to cry. "I didn't expect to see this," he said. "I didn't think I'd get to have this memory."

I fitted myself against him, working our bodies so tight it felt as if we'd been carved from the same smooth stone. "Wait up for us," I whispered, and then I left.

Now, I hand a cup of punch to a boy whose hair is just starting to fall out in small tufts. It sheds on the black lapel of his tuxedo. "Thanks," he says, and I see he has the most beautiful eyes, dark and still as a panther's. I glance away and realize that Kate and Taylor are gone.

What if she's sick? What if he's sick? I have promised myself I wouldn't be overprotective, but there are too many children here for the staff to really keep track of. I ask another parent to take over my punch station and then I search out the ladies' room. I check the supply closet. I walk through empty hallways and dark corridors and even the chapel.

Finally I hear Kate's voice through a cracked doorway. She and Taylor stand under a spotlight moon, holding hands. The courtyard they've found is a favorite for the residents during the daytime; many doctors who wouldn't otherwise see the light of the sun take their lunches out here.

I am about to ask if they're all right when Kate speaks. "Are you afraid of dying?"

Taylor shakes his head. "Not really. Sometimes, though, I think about my funeral. If people will say good things, you know, about me. If anyone will cry." He hesitates. "If anyone will even come."

"I will," Kate promises.

Taylor dips his head toward Kate's, and she sways closer, and I realize that this is why I followed them. I knew this was what I would find, and like Brian, I wanted one more picture of my daughter, one that I might worry between my fingers like a piece of sea glass. Taylor lifts up the edges of her blue hygienic mask and I know I should stop him, I know I have to, but I don't. This much I want her to have.

When they kiss, it is beautiful: those alabaster heads bent together, smooth as statues—an optical illusion, a mirror image that's folding into itself.

When Kate goes into the hospital for her stem cell transplant, she's an emotional wreck. She is far less concerned with the runny fluid being infused into her catheter than she is with the fact that Taylor hasn't called her in three days, and has in fact not returned her calls either. "Did you have a fight?" I ask, and she shakes her head. "Did he say he was going somewhere? Maybe it was an emergency," I say. "Maybe this has nothing to do with you at all."