e only have those two, I start to say, and then I realize that Dr. Chance is talking about a family I haven't yet had, of children I never intended. I turn to him, a question on my lips.

“Brian will wonder where we've gone.” He starts to walk toward his office, holding up the pot. “What plants,” he asks conversationally, “would I be least likely to kill?”

It is so easy to presume that while your own world has ground to an absolute halt, so has everyone else's. But the trash collector has taken our garbage and left the cans in the road, just like always. There is a bill from the oil truck tucked into the front door. Neatly stacked on the counter is a week's worth of mail. Amazingly, life has gone on.

Kate is released from the hospital a full week after her admission for induction chemotherapy. The central line still snaking from her chest bells out her blouse. The nurses give me a pep talk for encouragement, and a long list of instructions to follow: when to and when not to call the emergency room, when we are expected back for more chemotherapy, how to be careful during Kate's period of immunosuppression.

At six the next morning, the door to our bedroom opens. Kate tiptoes toward the bed, although Brian and I have come awake in an instant. “What is it, honey?” Brian asks.

She doesn't speak, just lifts her hand to her head and threads her fingers through her hair. It comes out in a thick clump, drifts down to the carpet like a small blizzard.

“All done,” Kate announces a few nights later at dinner. Her plate is still full; she hasn't touched her beans or her meat loaf. She dances off to the living room to play.

“Me too.” Jesse pushes back from the table. “Can I be excused?”

Brian spears another mouthful with his fork. “Not until you finish everything green.”

“I hate beans.”

“They're not too crazy about you, either.”

Jesse looks at Kate's plate. “She gets to be finished. That's not fair.”

Brian sets his fork down on the side of his plate. “Fair?” he answers, his voice too quiet. “You want to be fair? All right, Jess. The next time Kate has a bone marrow aspiration, we'll let you get one, too. When we flush her central line, we'll make sure you go through something equally as painful. And next time she gets chemo, we'll—”

“Brian!” I interrupt.

He stops as abruptly as he's started, and passes a shaking hand over his eyes. Then his gaze lands on Jesse, who has taken refuge under my arm. “I… I'm sorry, Jess. I don't…” But whatever he is about to say vanishes, as Brian walks out of the kitchen.

For a long moment we sit in silence. Then Jesse turns to me. “Is Daddy sick, too?”

I think hard before I answer. “We're all going to be fine,” I reply.

On the one-week anniversary of our return home, we are awakened in the middle of the night by a crash. Brian and I race each other to Kate's room. She lies in bed, shaking so hard that she's knocked a lamp off her nightstand. “She's burning up,” I tell Brian, when I lay my hand against her forehead.

I have wondered how I will decide whether or not to call the doctor, should Kate develop any strange symptoms. I look at her now and cannot believe I would ever be so stupid to believe that I wouldn't know, immediately, what Sick looks like. “We're going to the ER,” I announce, although Brian is already wrapping Kate's blankets around her and lifting her out of her crib. We bustle her to the car and start the engine and then remember that we cannot leave Jesse home alone.

“You go with her,” Brian answers, reading my mind. “I'll stay here.” But he doesn't take his eyes off Kate.

Minutes later, we are speeding toward the hospital, Jesse in the backseat next to his sister, asking why we need to get up, when the sun hasn't.

In the ER, Jesse sleeps on a nest of our coats. Brian and I watch the doctors hover over Kate's feverish body, bees over a field of flowers, drawing what they can from her. She is pan-cultured and given a spinal tap to try to isolate the cause of the infection and rule out meningitis. A radiologist brings in a portable X-ray machine to take a film of her chest, to see if this infection lives in her lungs.

Afterward, he places the chest film on the light panel outside the door. Kate's ribs seem as thin as matchsticks, and there is a large gray blot just off center. My knees go weak, and I find myself grabbing on to Brian's arm. “It's a tumor. The cancer's metastasized.”

The doctor puts his hand on my shoulder. “Mrs. Fitzgerald,” he says, “that's Kate's heart.”

Pancytopenia is a fancy word that means there is nothing in Kate's body protecting her against infection. It means, Dr. Chance says, that the chemo worked—that a great majority of white blood cells in Kate's body have been wiped out. It also means that nadir sepsis—a post-chemo infection—is not a likelihood, but a given.

She is dosed with Tylenol to reduce her fever. She has blood, urine and respiratory secretion cultures taken, so that the appropriate antibiotics can be administered. It takes six hours before she is free of the rigors—a round of violent shaking so fierce that she is in danger of shimmying off the bed.

The nurse—a woman who braided Kate's hair in silky corn-rows one afternoon a few weeks back, to make her smile—takes Kate's temperature and then turns to me. “Sara,” she says gently, “you can breathe now.”

Kate's face looks as tiny and white as those distant moons that Brian likes to spot in his telescope—still, remote, cold. She looks like a corpse… and even worse, this is a relief, compared to watching her suffer.

“Hey.” Brian touches the crown of my head. He juggles Jesse in his other arm. It is nearly noon, and we are all still in pajamas; we never thought to take a change of clothes. “I'm gonna take him down to the cafeteria; get some lunch. You want something?”

I shake my head. Scooting my chair closer to Kate's bed, I smooth the covers over her legs. I take her hand, and measure it against my own.

Her eyes slit open. For a moment she struggles, unsure of where she is. “Kate,” I whisper. “I'm right here.” As she turns her head and focuses on me, I lift her palm to my mouth, press a kiss in its center. “You are so brave,” I tell her, and then I smile. “When I grow up, I want to be just like you.”

To my surprise, Kate shakes her head hard. Her voice is a feather, a thread. “No Mommy,” she says. “You'd be sick.”

In my first dream, the IV fluid is dripping too quickly into Kate's central line. The saline pumps her up from the inside out, a balloon to be inflated. I try to pull the infusion, but it's held fast in the central line. As I watch, Kate's features smooth, blur, obliterate, until her face is a white oval that could be anyone at all.

In my second dream, I am in a maternity ward, giving birth. My body tunnels in, my heart pulses low in my belly. There is a rush of pressure, and then the baby arrives in a lightning rush and flow. “It's a girl,” the nurse beams, and she hands me the newborn.

I pull the pink blanket from her face, then stop. "This isn't

Kate," I say.

“Of course not,” the nurse agrees. “But she's still yours.”

The angel that arrives is wearing Armani and barking into a cell phone as she enters the hospital room. “Sell it,” my sister orders. “I don't care if you have to set up a lemonade stand in Fanueil Hall and give the shares away, Peter. I said sell.” She pushes a button and holds out her arms to me. “Hey,” Zanne soothes when I burst into tears. “Did you really think I'd listen to you when you told me not to come?”

“But—”

“Faxes. Phones. I can work from your home. Who else is going to watch Jesse?”

Brian and I look at each other; we haven't thought that far. In response, Brian stands up, hugs Zanne awkwardly. Jesse runs toward her at full tilt. “Who's that kid you adopted, Sara… because Jesse can't possibly be that big…” She disengages Jesse from her knees and leans down over the hospital bed, where Kate is sleeping. “I bet you don't remember me,” Zanne says, her eyes bright. “But I remember you.”

It comes so easy—letting her take charge. Zanne gets Jesse involved in a game of tic-tac-toe and bullies a Chinese restaurant that doesn't deliver into bringing up lunch. I sit beside Kate, basking in my sister's competence. I let myself pretend she can fix the things I can't.

After Zanne takes Jesse home for the night, Brian and I become bookends in the dark, bracketing Kate. “Brian,” I whisper. “I've been thinking.”

He shifts in his seat. “What about?”

I lean forward, so that I catch his eye. “Having a baby.”

Brian's eyes narrow. “Jesus, Sara.” He gets to his feet, turns his back to me. “Jesus.”

I stand up, too. “It's not what you think.”

When he faces me, pain draws every line of his features tight. “We can't just replace Kate if she dies,” he says.

In the hospital bed, Kate shifts, rustling the sheets. I force myself to imagine her at age four, wearing a Halloween costume; age twelve, trying out lip gloss; age twenty, dancing around a dorm room. “I know. So we have to make sure that she doesn't.”

 

WEDNESDAY

I will read ashes for you, if you ask me.

I will look in the fire and tell you from the gray lashes

And out of the red and black tongues and stripes,

I will tell how fire comes

And how fire runs as far as the sea.

—CARL SANDBURG, “Fire Pages”

 

CAMPBELL

WE ARE ALL, I SUPPOSE, beholden to our parents—the question is, how much? This is what runs through my mind while my mother jabbers on about my father's latest affair. Not for the first time, I wish for siblings—if only so that I would receive sunrise phone calls like this only once or twice a week, instead of seven.

“Mother,” I interrupt, “I doubt that she's actually sixteen.”

“You underestimate your father, Campbell.”

Maybe, but I also know that he's a federal judge. He may leer after schoolgirls, but he'd never do anything illegal. “Mom, I'm late for court. I'll check back in with you later,” I say, and I hang up before she can protest.

I am not going to court, but still. Taking a deep breath, I shake my head and find Judge staring at me. “Reason number 106 why dogs are smarter than humans,” I say. “Once you leave the litter, you sever contact with your mothers.”

I walk into the kitchen as I am knotting my tie. My apartment, it is a work of art. Sleek and minimalist, but what is there is the best that money can buy—a one-of-a-kind black leather couch; a flat screen television hanging on the wall; a locked glass case filled with signed first editions from authors like Hemingway and Hawthorne. My coffeemaker comes imported from Italy; my refrigerator is subzero. I open it and find a single onion, a bottle of ketchup, and three rolls of black-and-white film.

This, too, is no surprise—I rarely eat at home. Judge is so used to restaurant food he wouldn't recognize kibble if it slid its way down his throat. “What do you think?” I ask him. “Rosie's sound good?”

He barks as I fasten his service-dog harness. Judge and I have been together for seven years. I bought him from a breeder of police dogs, but he was specially trained with me in mind. As for his name, well, what attorney wouldn't want to be able to put a Judge in a crate every now and then?

Rosie's is what Starbucks wishes it was: eclectic and funky, crammed with patrons who at any time might be reading Russian lit in its original tongue or balancing a company's budget on a laptop or writing a screenplay while mainlining caffeine. Judge and I usually walk there and sit at our usual table, in the back. We order a double espresso and two chocolate croissants, and we flirt shamelessly with Ophelia, the twenty-year-old waitress. But today, when we walk inside, Ophelia is nowhere to be found and there is a woman sitting at our table, feeding a toddler in a stroller a bagel. This throws me for such a loop that Judge needs to tug me to the only spot that's free, a stool at the counter that looks out on the street.

Seven-thirty A.M., and already this day is a bust.

A heroin-thin boy with enough rings in his eyebrows to resemble a shower curtain rod approaches with a pad. He sees Judge at my feet. “Sorry, dude. No dogs allowed.”

“This is a service dog,” I explain. “Where's Ophelia?”

“She's gone, man. Eloped, last night.”

Eloped? People still do that? “With whom?” I ask, though it's none of my business.

“Some performance artist who sculpts dog crap into busts of world leaders. It's supposed to be a statement.”

I feel a momentary pang for poor Ophelia. Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow—beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.

The waiter reaches into his back pocket and hands me a plastic card. “Here's the Braille menu.”

“I want a double espresso and two croissants, and I'm not blind.”

“Then what's Fido for?”

“I have SARS,” I say. “He's tallying the people I infect.”

The waiter can't seem to figure out if I am joking. He backs away, unsure, to get my coffee.

Unlike my normal table, this one has a view of the street. I watch an elderly lady narrowly avoid the swipe of a taxi; a boy dances past with a radio three times the size of his head balanced on his shoulder. Twins in parochial school uniforms giggle behind the pages of a teen magazine. And a woman with a running river of black hair spills coffee on her skirt, dropping the paper cup on the pavement.

Inside me, everything stops. I wait for her to lift her face—to see if this could possibly be who I think it is—but she turns away from me, blotting the fabric with a napkin. A bus cuts the world in half, and my cell phone begins to ring.

I glance down at the incoming number: no surprise there. Turning off the power button without bothering to take my mother's call, I glance back at the woman outside the window, but by then the bus is gone and so is she.

I open the door of the office, already barking orders for Kerri. “Call Osterlitz and ask him whether he's available to testify during the Weiland trial; get a list of other complainants who've gone up against New England Power in the past five years; make me a copy of the Melbourne deposition; and phone Jerry at the court and ask who the judge is going to be for the Fitzgerald kid's hearing.”

She glances up at me as the phone begins to ring. “Speaking of.” She jerks her head in the direction of the door to my inner sanctum. Anna Fitzgerald stands on the threshold with a spray can of industrial cleaner and a chamois cloth, polishing the doorknob.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“What you told me to.” She looks down at the dog. “Hey, Judge.”

“Line two for you,” Kerri interrupts. I give her a measured look—why she even let this kid in here is beyond me—and try to get into my office, but whatever Anna has put on the hardware makes it too greasy to turn. I struggle for a moment, until she grips the knob with the cloth and opens the door for me.

Judge circles the floor, finding the most comfortable spot. I punch the blinking light on the call row. “Campbell Alexander.”

“Mr. Alexander, this is Sara Fitzgerald. Anna Fitzgerald's mother.” I let this information settle. I stare at her daughter, polishing a mere five feet away.

“Mrs. Fitzgerald,” I answer, and as expected, Anna stops in her tracks.

“I'm calling because… well, you see, this is all a misunderstanding.”

“Have you filed a response to the petition?”

“That isn't going to be necessary. I spoke to Anna last night, and she isn't going to continue with her case. She wants to do anything she can to help Kate.”

“Is that so.” My voice falls flat. “Unfortunately, if my client is planning to call off her lawsuit, I'll need to hear it directly from her.” I raise a brow, catch Anna's gaze. “You wouldn't happen to know where she is?”

“She went out for a run,” Sara Fitzgerald says. “But we're going to come down to the courthouse this afternoon. We'll talk to the judge, and get this straightened out.”

“I suppose I'll see you then.” I hang up the phone and cross my arms, look at Anna. “Is there something you'd like to tell me?”

She shrugs. “Not really.”

“That's not what your mother seems to think. Then again, she's also under the impression that you're out playing Flo Jo.”

Anna glances out into the reception area, where Kerri, naturally, is hanging on our words like a cat on a rope. She closes the door and walks up to my desk. “I couldn't tell her I was coming here, not after last night.”

“What happened last night?” When Anna goes mute, I lose my patience. “Listen. If you're not going to go through with a lawsuit… if this is a colossal waste of my time… then I'd appreciate it if you had the honesty to tell me now, rather than later. Because I'm not a family therapist or your best buddy; I'm your attorney. And for me to be your attorney there actually has to be a case. So I will ask you one more time: have you changed your mind about this lawsuit?”

I expect this tirade to put an end to the litigation, to reduce Anna to a wavering puddle of indecision. But to my surprise, she looks right at me, cool and collected. “Are you still willing to represent me?” she asks.

Against my better judgment, I say yes.

“Then no,” she says, “I haven't changed my mind.”

The first time I sailed in a yacht club race with my father I was fourteen, and he was dead set against it. I wasn't old enough; I wasn't mature enough; the weather was too iffy. What he really was saying was that having me crew for him was more likely to lose him the cup than to win it. In my father's eyes, if you weren't perfect, you simply weren't.

His boat was a USA-1 class, a marvel of mahogany and teak, one he'd bought from the keyboard player J. Geils up in Marblehead. In other words: a dream, a status symbol, and a rite of passage, all wrapped up in a gleaming white sail and a honey-colored hull.

We hit the start dead-on, crossing the line at full sail just as the cannon shot off. I did my best to be a step ahead of where my father needed me to be—guiding the rudder before he even gave the order, jibing and tacking until my muscles burned with effort. And maybe this even would have had a happy ending, but then a storm blew in from the north, bringing sheets of rain and swells that stretched ten feet high, pitching us from height to gulley.

I watched my father move in his yellow slicker. He didn't seem to notice it was raining; he certainly didn't want to crawl into a hole and clutch his sick stomach and die, like I did. “Campbell,” he bellowed, “come about.”

But to turn into the wind meant to ride another roller coaster up and down. “Campbell,” my father repeated, “now.”

A trough opened up in front of us; the boat dipped so sharply I lost my footing. My father lunged past me, grabbing for the rudder. For one blessed moment, the sails went still. Then the boom whipped across, and the boat tacked along an opposite course.

“I need coordinates,” my father ordered.

Navigating meant going down into the hull where the charts were, and doing the math to figure out what heading we had to be on to reach the next race buoy. But being below, away from the fresh air, only made it worse. I opened a map just in time to throw up all over it.

My father found me by default, because I hadn't returned with an answer. He poked his head down and saw me sitting in a puddle of my own vomit. “For Christ's sake,” he muttered, and left me.

It took all the strength I had to pull myself up after him. He jerked the wheel and yanked at the rudder. He pretended I was not there. And when he jibed, he did not call it. The sail whizzed across the boat, ripping the seam of the sky. The boom flew, clipped me on the back of the head and knocked me out.

I came to just as my father was stealing the wind of another boat, mere feet from the finish line. The rain had mellowed to a mist, and as he put our craft between the airstream and our closest competitor, the other boat fell back. We won by seconds.

I was told to clean up my mess and take the taxi in, while my father sailed the dory to the yacht club to celebrate. It was an hour later when I finally arrived, and by then he was in high spirits, drinking scotch from the crystal cup he had won. “Here comes your crew, Cam,” a friend called out. My father lifted the victory cup in salute, drank deeply, and then slammed it down so hard on the bar that its handle shattered.

“Oh,” said another sailor. “That's a shame.”

My father never took his eyes off me. “Isn't it, though,” he said.

On the rear bumper of practically every third car in Rhode Island you'll find a red-and-white sticker celebrating the victims of some of the bigger criminal cases in the state: My Friend Katie DeCubellis Was Killed by a Drunk Driver. My Friend John Sisson Was Killed by a Drunk Driver. These are given out at school fairs and fund-raisers and hair salons, and it doesn't matter if you never knew the kid who got killed; you put them on your vehicle out of solidarity and secret joy that this tragedy did not happen to you.

Last year, there were red-and-white stickers with a new victim's name: Dena DeSalvo. Unlike the other victims, this was one I knew marginally. She was the twelve-year-old daughter of a judge, who reportedly broke down during a custody trial held shortly after the funeral and took a three-month leave of absence to deal with his grief. The same judge, incidentally, who has been assigned to Anna Fitzgerald's case.

As I make my way into the Garrahy Complex, where the family court is housed, I wonder if a man carrying around so much baggage will be able to try a case where a winning outcome for my client will precipitate the death of her teenage sister.

There is a new bailiff at the entrance, a man with a neck as thick as a redwood and most likely the brainpower to match. “Sorry,” he says. “No pets.”

“This is a service dog.”

Confused, the bailiff leans forward and peers into my eyes. I do the same, right back at him. “I'm nearsighted. He helps me read the road signs.” Stepping around the guy, Judge and I head down the hall to the courtroom.

Inside, the clerk is being taken down a peg by Anna Fitzgerald's mother. That's my assumption, at least, because in actuality the woman looks nothing like her daughter, who stands beside her. “I'm quite sure that in this case, the judge would understand,” Sara Fitzgerald argues. Her husband waits a few feet behind her, apart.

When Anna notices me, a wash of relief rushes over her features. I turn to the clerk of the court. “I'm Campbell Alexander,” I say. “Is there a problem?”

“I've been trying to explain to Mrs. Fitzgerald, here, that we only allow attorneys into chambers.”

“Well, I'm here on behalf on Anna,” I reply.

The clerk turns to Sara Fitzgerald. “Who's representing your party?”

Anna's mother is stricken for a moment. She turns to her husband. “It's like riding a bicycle,” she says quietly.

Her husband shakes his head. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“I don't want to do this. I have to do this.”

The words fall into place like cogs. “Hang on,” I say. “You're a lawyer?”

Sara turns. “Well, yes.”

I glance down at Anna, incredulous. “And you neglected to mention this?”

“You never asked,” she whispers.

The clerk gives us each an Entry of Appearance form, and summons the sheriff.

“Vern.” Sara smiles. “Good to see you again.”

Oh, this just keeps getting better.

“Hey!” The sheriff kisses her cheek, shakes hands with the husband. “Brian.”

So not only is she an attorney; she also has all the public servants in the palm of her hand. “Are we finished with Old Home Day?” I ask, and Sara Fitzgerald rolls her eyes at the sheriff: The guy's a jerk, but what are you gonna do? “Stay here,” I tell Anna, and I follow her mother back toward chambers.

Judge DeSalvo is a short man with a monobrow and a fondness for coffee milk. “Good morning,” he says, waving us toward our seats. “What's with the dog?”

“He's a service dog, Your Honor.” Before he can say anything else, I leap into the genial conversation that heralds every meeting in chambers in Rhode Island. We are a small state, smaller still in the legal community. It is not only conceivable that your paralegal is the niece or sister-in-law of the judge with whom you're meeting; it's downright likely. As we chat, I glance over at Sara, who needs to understand which of us is part of this game, and which of us isn't. Maybe she was an attorney, but not in the ten years I've been one.

She is nervous, pleating the bottom of her blouse. Judge DeSalvo notices. “I didn't know you were practicing law again.”

“I wasn't planning to, Your Honor, but the complainant is my daughter.”

At that, the judge turns to me. “Well, what's this all about, Counselor?”

“Mrs. Fitzgerald's youngest daughter is seeking medical emancipation from her parents.”

Sara shakes her head. “That's not true, Judge.” Hearing his name, my dog glances up. “I spoke to Anna, and she assured me she really doesn't want to do this. She had a bad day, and wanted a little extra attention.” Sara lifts a shoulder. “You know how thirteen-year-olds can be.”

The room grows so quiet, I can hear my own pulse. Judge DeSalvo doesn't know how thirteen-year-olds can be. His daughter died when she was twelve.

Sara's face flames red. Like the rest of this state, she knows about Dena DeSalvo. For all I know, she's got one of the bumper stickers on her minivan. "Oh God, I'm sorry. I didn't mean—

The judge looks away. “Mr. Alexander, when was the last time you spoke with your client?”

“Yesterday morning, Your Honor. She was in my office when her mother called me to say it was a misunderstanding.”

Predictably, Sara's jaw drops. “She couldn't have been. She was jogging.”

I look at her. “You sure about that?”

“She was supposed to be jogging …”

“Your Honor,” I say, “this is precisely my point, and the reason Anna Fitzgerald's petition has merit. Her own mother isn't aware of where she is on any given morning; medical decisions regarding Anna are made with the same haphazard—”

“Counselor, can it.” The judge turns to Sara. “Your daughter told you she wanted to call off the lawsuit?”

“Yes.”

He glances at me. “And she told you that she wanted to continue?”

“That's right.”

“Then I'd better talk directly to Anna.”

When the judge gets up and walks out of chambers, we follow. Anna is sitting on a bench in the hall with her father. One of her sneakers is untied. “I spy something green,” I hear her say, and then she looks up.

“Anna,” I say, at the exact same moment as Sara Fitzgerald.

It is my responsibility to explain to Anna that Judge DeSalvo wants a few minutes in private. I need to coach her, so that she says the right things, so that the judge doesn't throw the case out before she gets what she wants. She is my client; by definition, she is supposed to follow my counsel.

But when I call her name, she turns toward her mother.

 

ANNA

I DON'T THINK ANYONE. WOULD COME, to my funeral. My parents, I guess, and Aunt Zanne and maybe Mr. Ollincott, the social studies teacher. I picture the same cemetery we went to for my grandmother's funeral, although that was in Chicago so it doesn't really make any sense. There would be rolling hills that look like green velvet, and statues of gods and lesser angels, and that big brown hole in the ground like a split seam, waiting to swallow the body that used to be me.

I imagine my mom in a black-veiled Jackie O hat, sobbing. My dad holding on to her. Kate and Jesse staring at the shine of the coffin and trying to plea-bargain with God for all the times they did something mean to me. It is possible that some of the guys from my hockey team would come, clutching lilies and their composure. “That Anna,” they'd say, and they wouldn't cry but they'd want to.

There would be an obituary on page twenty-four of the paper, and maybe Kyle McFee would see it and come to the funeral, his beautiful face twisted up with the what-ifs of the girlfriend he never got to have. I think there would be flowers, sweet peas and snapdragons and blue balls of hydrangea. I hope someone would sing “Amazing Grace,” not just the famous first verse but all of them. And afterward, when the leaves turned and the snow came, every now and then I would rise in everyone's minds like a tide.

At Kate's funeral, everyone will come. There will be nurses from the hospital who've gotten to be our friends, and other cancer patients still counting their lucky stars, and townspeople who helped raise money for her treatments. They will have to turn mourners away at the cemetery gates. There will be so many lush funeral baskets that some will be donated to charity. The newspaper will run a story of her short and tragic life. Mark my words, it will be on the front page.

Judge DeSalvo's wearing flip-flops, the kind soccer players wear when they take off their cleats. I don't know why, but this makes me feel a little better. I mean, it's bad enough I'm here in this courthouse, being led toward his private room in the back; there's something nice about knowing that I'm not the only one who doesn't quite fit the part.

He takes a can from a dwarf fridge and asks me what I'd like to drink. “Coke would be great,” I say.

The judge opens the can. “Did you know that if you leave a baby tooth in a glass of Coke, in a few weeks it'll completely disappear? Carbonic acid.” He smiles at me. “My brother is a dentist in Warwick. Does that trick every year for the kindergartners.”

I take a sip of the Coke, and imagine my insides dissolving. Judge DeSalvo doesn't sit down behind his desk, but instead takes a chair right next to me. “Here's the problem, Anna,” he says. “Your mom is telling me you want to do one thing. And your lawyer is telling me you want to do another. Now, under normal circumstances, I'd expect your mother to know you better than some guy you met two days ago. But you never would have met this guy if you hadn't sought him out for his services. And that makes me think that I need to hear what you think about all this.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” he says.

“Does there have to be a trial?”

“Well… your parents can just agree to medical emancipation, and that would be that,” the judge says.

Like that would ever happen.

“On the other hand, once someone files a petition—like you have—then the respondent—your parents—have to go to court. If your parents really believe you're not ready to make these kinds of decisions by yourself, they have to present their reasons to me, or else risk having me find in your favor by default.”

I nod. I have told myself that no matter what, I'm going to keep cool. If I fall apart at the seams, there's no way this judge will think I'm capable of deciding anything. I have all these brilliant intentions, but I get sidetracked by the sight of the judge, lifting his can of apple juice.

Not too long ago, when Kate was in the hospital to get her kidneys checked out, a new nurse handed her a cup and asked for a urine sample. “It better be ready when I come back for it,” she said. Kate—who isn't a fan of snotty demands—decided the nurse needed to be taken down a peg. She sent me out on a mission to the vending machines, to get the very juice that the judge is drinking now. She poured this into the specimen cup, and when the nurse came back, held it up to the light. “Huh,” Kate said. “Looks a little cloudy. Better filter it through again.” And then she lifted it to her lips and drank it down.

The nurse turned white and flew out of the room. Kate and I, we laughed until our stomachs cramped. For the rest of that day, all we had to do was catch each other's eye and we'd dissolve.

Like a tooth, and then there's nothing left.

“Anna?” Judge DeSalvo prompts, and then he sets that stupid can of Mott's down on the table between us and I burst into tears.

“I can't give a kidney to my sister. I just can't.”

Without a word, Judge DeSalvo hands me a box of Kleenex. I wad some into a ball, wipe at my eyes and my nose. For a while, he's quiet, letting me catch my breath. When I look up I find him waiting. “Anna, no hospital in this country will take an organ from an unwilling donor.”

“Who do you think signs off on it?” I ask. “Not the little kid getting wheeled into the OR—her parents.”

“You're not a little kid; you could certainly make your objections known,” he says.

“Oh, right,” I say, tearing up again. “When you complain because someone's sticking a needle into you for the tenth time, it's considered standard operating procedure. All the adults look around with fake smiles and tell each other that no one voluntarily asks for more needles.” I blow my nose into a Kleenex. “The kidney—that's just today. Tomorrow it'll be something else. It's always something else.”

“Your mother told me you want to drop the lawsuit,” he says. “Did she lie to me?”

“No.” I swallow hard.

“Then… why did you lie to her?”

There are a thousand answers for that; I choose the easy one. “Because I love her,” I say, and the tears come all over again. “I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.”

He stares at me hard. “You know what, Anna? I'm going to appoint someone who's going to help your lawyer tell me what's best for you. How does that sound?”

My hair's fallen all over the place; I tuck it behind my ear. My face is so red it feels swollen. “Okay,” I answer.

“Okay.” He presses an intercom button, and asks to have everyone else sent back.

My mother comes into the room first and starts to make her way over to me, until Campbell and his dog cut her off. He raises his brows and gives me a thumbs-up sign, but it's a question. “I'm not sure what's going on,” Judge DeSalvo says, “so I'm appointing a guardian ad litem to spend two weeks with her. Needless to say, I expect full cooperation on both of your parts. I want the guardian ad litem's report back, and then we'll have a hearing. If there's anything more I need to know at that time, bring it with you.”

“Two weeks…” my mother says. I know what she's thinking. “Your Honor, with all due respect, two weeks is a very long time, given the severity of my other daughter's illness.”

She looks like someone I do not recognize. I have seen her before be a tiger, fighting a medical system that isn't moving fast enough for her. I have seen her be a rock, giving the rest of us something to cling to. I have seen her be a boxer, coming up swinging before the next punch can be thrown by Fate. But I have never seen her be a lawyer before.

Judge DeSalvo nods. "All right. We'll have a hearing next Monday, then. In the meantime I want Kate's medical records brought to—

“Your Honor,” Campbell Alexander interrupts. “As you're well aware, due to the strange circumstances of this case, my client is living with opposing counsel. That's a flagrant breach of justice.”

My mother sucks in her breath. “You are not suggesting my child be taken away from me.”

Taken away? Where would I go?

“I can't be sure that opposing counsel won't try to use her living arrangements to her best advantage, Your Honor, and possibly pressure my client.” Campbell stares right at the judge, unblinking.

“Mr. Alexander, there is no way I am pulling this child out of her home,” Judge DeSalvo says, but then he turns to my mother. “However, Mrs. Fitzgerald, you cannot talk about this case with your daughter unless her attorney is present. If you can't agree to that, or if I hear of any breach in that domestic Chinese wall, I may have to take more drastic action.”

“Understood, Your Honor,” my mother says.

“Well.” Judge DeSalvo stands up. “I'll see you all next week.” He walks out of the room, his flip-flops making small sucking slaps on the tile floor.

The minute he is gone, I turn to my mother. / can explain, I want to say, but it never makes its way out loud. Suddenly a wet nose pokes into my hand. Judge. It makes my heart, that runaway train, slow down.

“I need to speak to my client,” Campbell says.

“Right now she's my daughter,” my mother says, and she takes my hand and yanks me out of my chair. At the threshold of the door, I manage to look back. Campbell's fuming. I could have told him it would wind up like this. Daughter trumps everything, no matter what the game.

World War III begins immediately, not with an assassinated archduke or a crazy dictator but with a missed left turn. “Brian,” my mother says, craning her neck. “That was North Park Street.”

My father blinks out of his fog. “You could have told me before I passed it.”

“I did.”

Before I can even weigh the costs and benefits of entering someone else's battle again, I say, “/ didn't hear you.”

My mother's head whips around. “Anna, right now, you are the last person whose input I need or want.”

“I just—”

She holds up her hand like the privacy partition in a cab. She shakes her head.

On the backseat, I slide sideways and curl my feet up, facing to the rear, so that all I see is black.

“Brian,” my mother says. “You missed it again.”

When we walk in, my mother steams past Kate, who opened the door for us, and past Jesse, who is watching what looks like the scrambled Playboy channel on TV. In the kitchen, she opens cabinets and bangs them shut. She takes food from the refrigerator and smacks it onto the table.

“Hey,” my father says to Kate. “How're you feeling?”

She ignores him, pushing into the kitchen. “What happened?”

“What happened. Well.” My mother pins me with a gaze. “Why don't you ask your sister what happened?”

Kate turns to me, all eyes.

“Amazing how quiet you are now, when a judge isn't listening,” my mother says.

Jesse turns off the television. “She made you talk to a judge? Damn, Anna.”

My mother closes her eyes. “Jesse, you know, now would be a good time for you to leave.”

“You don't have to ask me twice,” he says, his voice full of broken glass. We hear the front door open and shut, a whole story.

“Sara.” My father steps into the room. “We all need to cool off a little.”

“I have one child who's just signed her sister's death sentence, and I'm supposed to cool off?”

The kitchen gets so silent we can hear the refrigerator whispering. My mother's words hang like too-ripe fruit, and when they fall on the floor and burst, she shudders into motion. “Kate,” she says, hurrying toward my sister, her arms already outstretched. “Kate, I shouldn't have said that. It's not what I meant.”

In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we ought to and not meaning what we do. Kate covers her mouth with her hand. She backs out of the kitchen door, bumping into my father, who fumbles but cannot catch her as she scrambles upstairs. I hear the door to our room slam shut. My mother, of course, goes after her.

So I do what I do best. I move in the opposite direction.

Is there any place on earth that smells better than a Laundromat? It's like a rainy Sunday when you don't have to get out from under your covers, or like lying back on the grass your father's just mowed—comfort food for your nose. When I was little my mom would take hot clothes out of the dryer and dump them on top of me where I was sitting on the couch. I used to pretend they were a single skin, that I was curled tight beneath them like one large heart.

The other thing I like is that Laundromats draw lonely people like metal to magnets. There's a guy passed out on a bank of chairs in the back, with army boots and a T-shirt that says Nostradamus Was an Optimist. A woman at the folding table sifts through a heap of men's button-down shirts, sniffing back tears. Put ten people together in a Laundromat and chances are you won't be the one who's worst off.

I sit down across from a bank of washers and try to match up the clothes with the people waiting. The pink panties and lace nightgown belong to the girl who is reading a romance novel. The woolly red socks and checkered shirt are the skanky sleeping student. The soccer jerseys and kiddie overalls come from the toddler who keeps handing filmy white dryer sheets to her mom, oblivious on a cell phone. What kind of person can afford a cell phone, but not her own washer and dryer?

I play a game with myself, sometimes, and try to imagine what it would be like to be the person whose clothes are spinning in front of me. If I were washing those carpenter jeans, maybe I'd be a roofer in Phoenix, my arms strong and my back tan. If I had those flowered sheets, I might be on break from Harvard, studying criminal profiling. If I owned that satin cape, I might have season tickets to the ballet. And then I try to picture myself doing any of these things and I can't. All I can ever see is me, being a donor for Kate, each time stretching to the next.

Kate and I are Siamese twins; you just can't see the spot where we're connected. Which makes separation that much more difficult.

When I look up the girl who works the Laundromat is standing over me, with her lip ring and blue streaked dreadlocks. “You need change?” she asks.

To tell you the truth, I'm afraid to hear my own answer.

 

JESSE

I AM THE KID WHO PLAYED with matches. I used to steal them from the shelf above the refrigerator, take them into my parents' bathroom. Jean Nate Bath Splash ignites, did you know that? Spill it, strike, and you can set fire to the floor. It burns blue, and when the alcohol is gone, it stops.

Once, Anna walked in on me when I was in the bathroom. “Hey,” I said. “Check this out.” I dribbled some Jean Nate on the floor, her initials. Then I torched them. I figured she'd run screaming like a tattle-tale, but instead she sat right down on the edge of the bathtub. She reached for the bottle of Jean Nate, made some loopy design on the tiles, and told me to do it again.

Anna is the only proof I have that I was born into this family, instead of dropped off on the doorstep by some Bonnie and Clyde couple that ran off into the night. On the surface, we're polar opposites. Under the skin, though, we're the same: people think they know what they're getting, and they're always wrong.

Fuck them all. I ought to have that tattooed on my forehead, for all the times I've thought it. Usually I am in transit, speeding in my Jeep until my lungs give out. Today, I'm driving ninety-five down 95.1 weave in and out of traffic, sewing up a scar. People yell at me behind their closed windows. I give them the finger.

It would solve a thousand problems if I rolled the Jeep over an embankment. It's not like I haven't thought about it, you know. On my license, it says I'm an organ donor, but the truth is I'd consider being an organ martyr. I'm sure I'm worth a lot more dead than alive—the sum of the parts equals more than the whole. I wonder who might wind up walking around with my liver, my lungs, even my eyeballs. I wonder what poor asshole would get stuck with whatever it is in me that passes for a heart.

To my dismay, though, I get all the way to the exit without a scratch. I peel off the ramp and tool along Aliens Avenue. There's an underpass there where I know I'll find Duracell Dan. He's a homeless dude, Vietnam vet, who spends most of his time collecting batteries that people toss into the trash. What the hell he does with them, I don't know. He opens them up, I know that much. He says the CIA hides messages for all its operatives in Energizer double-As, that the FBI sticks to Evereadys.

Dan and I have a deal: I bring him a McDonald's Value Meal a few times a week, and in return, he watches over my stuff. I find him huddled over the astrology book that he considers his manifesto. “Dan,” I say, getting out of the car and handing him his Big Mac. “What's up?”

He squints at me. “The moon's in freaking Aquarius.” He stuffs a fry into his mouth. “I never should have gotten out of bed.”

If Dan has a bed, it's news to me. “Sorry about that,” I say. “Got my stuff?”

He jerks his head to the barrels behind the concrete pylon where he keeps my things. The perchloric acid filched from the chemistry lab at the high school is intact; in another barrel is the sawdust. I hike the stuffed pillowcase under my arm and haul it to the car. I find him waiting at the door. “Thanks.”

He leans against the car, won't let me get inside. “They gave me a message for you.”

Even though everything that comes out of Dan's mouth is total bullshit, my stomach rolls over. “Who did?”

He looks down the road, then back at me. “You know.” Leaning closer, he whispers, “Think twice.”

“That was the message?”

Dan nods. “Yeah. It was that, or Drink twice. I can't be sure.”

“That advice I might actually listen to.” I shove him a little, so that I can get into the car. He is lighter than you'd think, like whatever was inside him was used up long ago. With that reasoning, it's a wonder I don't float off into the sky. “Later,” I tell him, and then I drive toward the warehouse I've been watching.

I look for places like me: big, hollow, forgotten by most everyone. This one's in the Olneyville area. At one time, it was used as a storage facility for an export business. Now, it's pretty much just home to an extended family of rats. I park far enough away that no one would think twice about my car. I stuff the pillowcase of sawdust under my jacket and take off.

It turns out that I learned something from my dear old dad after all: firemen are experts at getting into places they shouldn't be. It doesn't take much to pick the lock, and then it's just a matter of figuring out where I want to start. I cut a hole in the bottom of the pillowcase and let the sawdust draw three fat initials, JBF. Then I take the acid and dribble it over the letters.

This is the first time I've done it in the middle of the day.

I take a pack of Merits out of my pocket and tamp them down, then stick one into my mouth. My Zippo's almost out of lighter fluid; I need to remember to get some. When I'm finished, I get to my feet, take one last drag, and toss the cigarette into the sawdust. I know this one's going to move fast, so I'm already running when the wall of fire rises behind me. Like all the others, they will look for clues. But this cigarette and my initials will have long been gone. The whole floor underneath them will melt. The walls will buckle and give.

The first engine reaches the scene just as I get back to my car and Pull the binoculars out of my trunk. By then, the fire's done what it wants to—escape. Glass has blown out of windows; smoke rises black, an eclipse.

The first time I saw my mother cry I was five. She was standing at the kitchen window, pretending that she wasn't. The sun was just coming up, a swollen knot. “What are you doing?” I asked. It was not until years later that I realized I had heard her answer all wrong. That when she said mourning, she had not been talking about the time of day.

The sky, now, is thick and dark with smoke. Sparks shower as the roof falls in. A second crew of firefighters arrives, the ones who have been called in from their dinner tables and showers and living rooms. With the binoculars, I can make out his name, winking on the back of his turnout coat like it's spelled in diamonds. Fitzgerald. My father lays hands on a charged line, and I get into my car and drive away.

At home, my mother is having a nervous breakdown. She flies out the door as soon as I pull into my parking spot. “Thank God,” she says. “I need your help.”

She doesn't even look back to see if I'm following her inside, and that is how I know it's Kate. The door to my sisters' room has been kicked in, the wooden frame around it splintered. My sister lies still on her bed. Then all of a sudden she bursts to life, jerking up like a tire jack and puking blood. A stain spreads over her shirt and onto her flowered comforter, red poppies where there weren't any before.

My mother gets down beside her, holding back her hair and pressing a towel up to her mouth when Kate vomits again, another gush of blood. “Jesse,” she says matter-of-factly, “your father's out on a call, and I can't reach him. I need you to drive us to the hospital, so that I can sit in the back with Kate.”

Kate's lips are slick as cherries. I pick her up in my arms. She's nothing but bones, poking sharp through the skin of her T-shirt.

“When Anna ran off, Kate wouldn't let me into her room,” my mother says, hurrying beside me. “I gave her a little while to calm down. And then I heard her coughing. I had to get in there.”

So you kicked it down, I think, and it doesn't surprise me. We reach the car, and she opens the door so that I can slide Kate inside. I pull out of the driveway and speed even faster than normal through town, onto the highway, toward the hospital.

Today, when my parents were at court with Anna, Kate and I watched TV. She wanted to put on her soap and I told her fuck off and put on the scrambled Playboy channel instead. Now, as I run through red lights, I'm wishing that I'd let her watch that retarded soap. I'm trying not to look at her little white coin of a face in the rearview mirror. You'd think, with all the time I've had to get used to it, that moments like this wouldn't come as such a shock. The question we cannot ask pushes through my veins with each beat: Is this it? Is this it? Is this it?

The minute we hit the ER driveway, my mother's out of the car, hurrying me to get Kate. We are quite a picture walking through the automatic doors, me with Kate bleeding in my arms, and my mother grabbing the first nurse who walks by. “She needs platelets,” my mother orders.

They take her away from me, and for a few moments, even after the ER team and my mother have disappeared with Kate behind closed curtains, I stand with my arms buoyed, trying to get used to the fact that there's no longer anything in them.

Dr. Chance, the oncologist I know, and Dr. Nguyen, some expert I don't, tell us what we've already figured out: these are the death throes of end-stage kidney disease. My mother stands next to the bed, her hand tight around Kate's IV pole. “Can you still do a transplant?” she asks, as if Anna never started her lawsuit, as if it means absolutely nothing.

“Kate's in a pretty grave clinical state,” Dr. Chance tells her. “I told you before I didn't know if she was strong enough to survive that level of surgery; the odds are even slighter now.”

“But if there was a donor,” she says, "would you do it?”

“Wait.“ You'd think my throat had just been paved with straw. ”Would mine work?"

Dr. Chance shakes his head. “A kidney donor doesn't have to be a perfect match, in an ordinary case. But your sister isn't an ordinary case.”

When the doctors leave, I can feel my mother staring at me. “Jesse,” she says.

“It wasn't like I was volunteering. I just wanted to, you know, know.” But inside, I'm burning just as hot as I was when that fire caught at the warehouse. What made me believe I might be worth something, even now? What made me think I could save my sister, when I can't even save myself?

Kate's eyes open, so that she's staring right at me. She licks her lips—they're still caked with blood—and it makes her look like a vampire. The undead. If only.

I lean closer, because she doesn't have enough in her right now to make the words creep across the air between us. Tell, she mouths, so that my mother won't look up.

I answer, just as silent. Tell? l want to make sure I've got it right.

Tell Anna.

But the door to the room bursts open and my father fills the room with smoke. His hair and clothes and skin reek of it, so much so that I look up, expecting the sprinklers to go off. “What happened?” he asks, going right to the bed.

I slip out of the room, because nobody needs me there anymore. In the elevator, in front of the NO SMOKING sign, I light a cigarette.

Tell Anna what?

 

SARA

-1991

BY PURE CHANCE, or maybe karmic distribution, all three clients at the hair salon are pregnant. We sit under the dryers, hands folded over our bellies like a row of Buddhas. “My top choices are Freedom, Low, and Jack,” says the girl next to me, who is getting her hair dyed pink.