Jodie Picoult - My Sister's Keeper

"I don't know," Brian says. "Does anyone?"

He hands me the package of Oreos. When I open my mouth to tell him I'm not hungry, Brian pushes a cookie inside. It is rich and rough against my tongue; suddenly I am famished. Brian brushes the crumbs from my lips as if I am made of fine china. I let him. I think maybe I have never tasted anything this sweet.

Brian and Anna move back home that night. We both tuck her in; we both kiss her. Brian goes to take a shower. In a little while, I will go to the hospital, but right now I sit down across from Anna, on Kate's bed. "Are you going to lecture me?" she asks.

"Not the way you think." I finger the edge of one of Kate's pillows. "You're not a bad person because you want to be yourself."

" I never—"

I hold up a hand. "What I mean is that those thoughts, they're human. And just because you turn out differently than everyone's imagined you would doesn't mean that you've failed in some way. A kid who gets teased in one school might move to a different one, and be the most popular girl there, just because no one has any other expectations of her. Or a person who goes to med school because his entire family is full of doctors might find out that what he really wants to be is an artist instead." I take a deep breath, and shake my head. "Am I making any sense?"

"Not really."

That makes me smile. "I guess I'm saying that you remind me of someone."

Anna comes up on an elbow. "Who?"

"Me," I say.

When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that you've worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recognize so well you could draw it by heart and for this very reason keep it with you on journeys at all times. And yet, when you least expect it, one day you open your eyes and there is an unfamiliar turnoff, a vantage point that wasn't there before, and you have to stop and wonder if maybe this landmark isn't new at all, but rather something you have missed all along.

Brian lies beside me on the bed. He doesn't say anything, just puts his hand on the valley made by the curve of my neck. Then he kisses me, long and bittersweet. This I expect, but not the next—he bites down on my lip so hard that I taste blood. "Ow," I say, trying to laugh a little, make light of this. But he doesn't laugh, or apologize. He leans forward, licks it off.

It makes me jump inside. This is Brian, and this is not Brian, and both of these things are remarkable. I run my own tongue over the blood, copper and slick. I open like an orchid, make my body a cradle, and feel his breath travel down my throat, over my breasts. He rests his head for a moment on my belly, and just as much as that bite was unexpected, there is now a pang of the familiar—this is what he would do each night, a ritual, when I was pregnant.

Then he moves again. He rises over me, a second sun, and fills me with light and heat. We are a study of contrasts—hard to soft, fair to dark, frantic to smooth—and yet there is something about the fit of us that makes me realize neither of us would be quite right without the other. We are a Mobius strip, two continuous bodies, an impossible tangle.

"We're going to lose her," I whisper, and even I don't know if I'm talking about Kate or about Anna.

Brian kisses me. "Stop," he says.

After that we don't talk anymore. That's safest.

IZZY IS SITTING IN THE LIVING ROOM when I come back from my morning run. "You okay?" she asks.

"Yeah." I unlace my sneakers, wipe the sweat off my forehead.

"Why?"

"Because normal people don't go jogging at 4:30 A.M."

"Well, I had some energy to burn off." I go into the kitchen, butt he Braun coffeemaker I've programmed to have my hazelnut ready at this very moment hasn't done its job. I check Eva's plug and press some of her buttons, but the whole LED display is shot.

"Dammit," I say, yanking the cord out of the wall. "This isn't old enough to be broken."

Izzy comes up beside me and fiddles with the system. "Is she under warranty?"

"I don't know. I don't care. All I know is when you pay for something that's supposed to give you a cup of coffee, you deserve to get your fucking cup of coffee." I slam down the empty glass carafe so hard it breaks in the sink. Then I slide down against the cabinets and start to cry.

Izzy kneels down next to me. "What did he do?"

"The same exact thing, Iz," I sob. "I am so damn stupid."

She puts her arms around me. "Boiling oil?" she suggests.

"Botulism? Castration? You pick."

That makes me smile a little. "You'd do it, too."

"Only because you'd do it right back for me."

I lean against my sister's shoulder. "I thought lightning wasn't supposed to strike in the same place twice."

"Sure it does," Izzy tells me. "But only if you're too dumb to move."

The first person to greet me at court the next morning isn't a person at all, but Judge the dog. He comes slinking around a corner with his ears flattened, no doubt running away from the sound of his owner's raised voice. "Hey," I say, soothing, but Judge wants none of it. He latches on to the bottom of my suit jacket—Campbell's paying the dry cleaning bill, I swear it—and starts to drag me toward the fray.

I can hear Campbell before I turn the corner. "I wasted time, and manpower, and you know what, that's not the worst of it. I wasted my own good judgment about a client."

"Yeah, well, you aren't the only one who judged wrong," Anna argues back. "I hired you because I thought you had a spine." She pushes past me. "Asshole," she mutters under her breath.

In that moment, I remember the way I felt when I woke up alone on that boat: Disappointed. Drifting. Angry at myself, for getting into this situation.

Why the hell wasn't I angry at Campbell?

Judge leaps up on Campbell, scraping at his chest with his paws. "Get down!" he orders, and then he turns around and sees me. "You weren't supposed to hear all that."

"I'll bet."

He sits heavily on a bridge chair in the conference room and passes his hand over his face. "She refuses to take the stand."

"Well, for God's sake, Campbell. She can't confront her mother in her own living room, much less in a cross-exam. What did you expect?"

He looks up at me, piercing. "What are you going to tell DeSalvo?"

"Are you asking because of Anna, or because you're afraid of losing this trial?"

"Thanks, but I gave my conscience up for Lent."

"Aren't you going to ask yourself why a thirteen-year-old girl's gotten under your skin?"

He grimaces. "Why don't you just butt out, Julia, and ruin my case like you were planning to do in the first place?"

"This isn't your case, it's Anna's. Although I can certainly see why you'd think otherwise."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You're cowards. You're both hell-bent on running away from yourself," I say. "I know what consequences Anna's afraid of. What about you?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"No? Where's the one-liner? Or is it too hard to joke about something that hits so close to the bone? You back away every time someone gets close to you. It's okay if Anna's just a client, but the minute she becomes someone you care about, you're in trouble. Me, well, a quick fuck's just fine, but making an emotional attachment, that's out of the question. The only relationship you have is with your dog, and even that's some enormous State secret."

"You are way out of line, Julia—"

"No, actually, I'm probably the only person who's qualified to let you know exactly what a jerk you are. But that's okay, right? Because if everyone thinks you're a jerk, no one will bother getting too close." I stare at him a beat longer. "It's disappointing to know that someone can see right through you, isn't it, Campbell."