Jodie Picoult - My Sister's Keeper

"Alf or Mr. Ed," Jesse says.

The corners of Kate's mouth turn up. "Horse. Eighth round."

"You're on."

Finally Brian leans down, kisses Kate's forehead. "Baby, you get a good night's sleep." As Anna and Jesse slip into the hall, he kisses me good-bye, too. "Call me," he whispers.

And then, when they are all gone, I sit down beside my daughter. Her arms are so thin I can see the bones shifting as she moves; her eyes seem older than mine.

"I guess you have questions," Kate says.

"Maybe later," I answer, surprising myself. I climb up onto the bed and fold her into my embrace.

I realize then that we never have children, we receive them. And sometimes it's not for quite as long as we would have expected or hoped. But it is still far better than never having had those children at all. "Kate," I confess, "I'm so sorry."

She pushes back from me, until she can look me in the eye. "Don't be," she says fiercely. "Because I'm not." She tries to smile, tries so damn hard. "It was a good one, Mom, wasn't it?"

I bite my lip, feel the heaviness of tears. "It was the best," I answer.

IT'S RAINING.

When I come out to the living room, Judge has his nose pressed against the plate glass wall that makes up one whole side of the apartment. He whines at the drops that zigzag past him. "You can't get them," I say, patting him on the head. "You can't get to the other side."

I sit down on the rug beside him, knowing I need to get up and get dressed and go to court; knowing that I ought to be reviewing my closing argument again and not sitting here idle. But there is something mesmerizing about this weather. I used to sit in the front seat of my father's Jag, watching the raindrops run their kamikaze suicide missions from one edge of the windshield to the wiper blade. He liked to leave the wipers on intermittent, so that the world went runny on my side of the glass for whole blocks of time. It made me crazy. When you drive, my father used to say when I complained, you can do what you want.

"You want the shower first?"

Julia stands in the open doorway of the bedroom, wearing one of my T-shirts. It hits her at mid-thigh. She curls her toes into the carpet.

"You go ahead," I tell her. "I could always just step out on the balcony instead."

She notices the weather. "Awful out, isn't it?"

"Good day to be stuck in court," I answer, but without any great conviction. I don't want to face Judge DeSalvo's decision today, and for once it has nothing to do with fear of losing this case. I've done the best I could, given what Anna admitted on the stand. And I hope like hell that I've made her feel a little better about what she's done, too. She doesn't look like an indecisive kid anymore, that much is true. She doesn't look selfish. She just looks like the rest of us—trying to figure out exactly who she is, and what to make of it.

The truth is, as Anna once told me, nobody's going to win. We are going to give our closing arguments and hear the judge's opinion and even then, it won't be over.

Instead of heading back to the bathroom, Julia approaches. She sits down cross-legged beside me and touches her fingers to the plate of glass. "Campbell," she says, "I don't know how to tell you this."

Everything inside me goes still. "Fast," I suggest.

"I hate your apartment."

I follow her eyes from the gray carpet to the black couch, to the mirrored wall and the lacquered bookshelves. It is full of sharp edges and expensive art. It has the most advanced electronic gadgets and bells and whistles. It is a dream residence, but it is nobody's home.

"You know," I say. "I hate it, too."

IT'S RAINING.

I go outside, and start walking. I head down the street and past the elementary school and through two intersections. I am soaked to the bone in about five minutes flat. That's when I start to run. I run so fast that my lungs start to ache and my legs burn, and finally when I cannot move another step I fling myself down on my back in the middle of the high school soccer field.

Once, I took acid here during a thunderstorm like this one. I lay down and watched the sky fall. I imagined the raindrops melting away my skin. I waited for the one stroke of lightning that would arrow through my heart, and make me feel one hundred percent alive for the first time in my whole sorry existence.

The lightning, it had its chance, and it didn't come that day. It doesn't come this morning, either.

So I get up, wipe my hair out of my eyes, and try to come up with a better plan.

IT'S RAINING.

The kind of rain that comes down so heavy it sounds like the shower's running, even when you've turned it off. The kind of rain that makes you think of dams and flash floods, arks. The kind of rain that tells you to crawl back into bed, where the sheets haven't lost your body heat, to pretend that the clock is five minutes earlier than it really is.

Ask any kid who's made it past fourth grade and they can tell you: water never stops moving. Rain falls, and runs down a mountain into a river. The river finds it way to the ocean. It evaporates, like a soul, into the clouds. And then, like everything else, it starts all over again.

IT'S RAINING.

Like the day Anna was born-New Year's Eve, and way too warm for that time of year. What should have been snow become a torrential downpour. Ski slopes had to close for Christmas, because all their runs got washed out. Driving to the hospital, with Sara in labor beside me, I could barely see through the windshield.

There were no stars that night, what with all the rain clouds. And maybe because of that, when Anna arrived I said to Sara, "Let's name her Andromeda. Anna, for short."

"Andromeda?" she said. "Like the sci-fi book?"

"Like the princess," I corrected. I caught her eye over the tiny horizon of our daughter's head. "In the sky," I explained, "she's between her mother and her father."

IT'S RAINING.

Not an auspicious beginning, I think, I shuffle my index cards on the table, trying to look more skilled than I actually am. Who was I kidding? I am no lawyer, no professional. I have been nothing more than a mother, and I have not even done a very square job of that.

"Mrs. Fitzgerald?" the judge prompts.

I take a deep breath, stare down at the gibberish in front of me, and grab the whole sheaf of index cards. Standing up, I clear my throat, and start to read aloud. "In this country we have a long legal history of allowing parents to make decisions for their children. It's part of what the courts have always found to be the constitutional right to privacy. And given all the evidence this court has heard—" Suddenly, there is a crash of lightning, and I drop all my notes onto the floor. Kneeling, I scramble to pick them up, but of course now they are out of order. I try to rearrange what I have in front of me, but nothing makes sense.

Oh, hell. It's not what I need to say, anyway.

"Your Honor," I ask, "can I start over?" When he nods, I turn my back on him, and walk toward my daughter, who is sitting beside Campbell.

"Anna," I tell her, "I love you. I loved you before I ever saw you, and I will love you long after I'm not here to say it. And I know that because I'm a parent, I'm supposed to have all the answers, but I don't. I wonder every single day if I'm doing the right thing. I wonder if I know my children the way I think I do. I wonder if I lose my perspective in being your mother, because I'm so busy being Kate's."