he got rid of me over thirty years ago. What if I barge into her life and she doesn’t want to see me?”

There was a soft sigh on the other end of the phone. It was, I realized, the sound I associated most with growing up. I’d heard it running into my mother’s arms when a kid had pushed me off the swing at the playground. I’d heard it during an embrace before my newly minted prom date and I drove off to the dance; I’d heard it when she stood at the threshold of my college dorm, trying not to cry as she left me on my own for the first time. In that sound was my whole childhood.

“Marin,” my mother said simply, “who wouldn’t want you?”

Honestly, I am not the kind of person who believes in ghosts and karma and reincarnation. And yet, the very next day I found myself calling in sick to work so that I could drive to Falmouth, Massachusetts, to talk to a psychic about my birth mother. I took another swig of my Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and imagined what the meeting would be like; whether I would come out of it with information that would send me in the right direction for my adoption search, like the woman who’d recommended Meshinda Dows and her prophecies in the first place.

The previous night I had joined ten adoption support groups online. I created a name for myself (Separ8tedatbirth@yahoo.com) and made lists from the websites in an empty Moleskine notebook.

1. USE STATE REGISTRIES.

2. REGISTER WITH ISRR—the Index of Search and Reunion Resources, the biggest registry there is.

3. REGISTER WITH THE WORLD WIDE REGISTRY.

4. TALK TO YOUR ADOPTIVE PARENTS…AND COUSINS, UNCLES, OLDER SIBLINGS…

5. FIGURE OUT YOUR CONDUIT. In other words, who arranged the adoption? A church, a lawyer, a physician, an agency? They might be a source of information.

6. FILE A WAIVER OF CONFIDENTIALITY, so if your birth mom comes looking for you, she knows that you want to be contacted.

7. POST YOUR INFO REGULARLY. There are people who really do forward all over in the hope that your info gets to the right place!

8. PLACE ADS IN THE PRIMARY NEWSPAPERS OF YOUR BIRTH CITY.

9. ABOVE ALL ELSE, IGNORE ANY SEARCH COMPANY YOU SEE ON TV ADS OR TALK SHOWS! THEY ARE SCAMS!

At two in the morning, I was still online in an adoption search chat room, reacting to horror stories from people who wanted to save me the trouble of making the same mistakes. There was RiggleBoy, who had contacted a 1-900 search number and given them his credit card information, only to be socked with a bill for $6500 at the end of one month. There was Joy4Eva, who’d found out that she was taken away from her birth family for neglect and abuse. AllieCapone688 gave me a list of three books that she used when she was getting started—which cost less than all she’d spent on private investigators. Only one woman had a happy ending: she’d gone to a psychic named Meshinda Dows, who had given her such accurate information that she found her birth mom in a week’s time. Try it, FantaC suggested. What have you got to lose?

Well, my self-respect, for one. But all the same, I found myself Googling Meshinda Dows. She had one of those websites that takes forever to load, because there was a music file attached—in this case, an eerie mix of chimes and humpback whale songs. Meshinda Dows, the home page read, Certified psychic counselor.

Who certified psychic counselors? The U.S. Department of Snake Oil and Charlatans?

Serving the Cape Cod community for 35 years.

Which meant she was within driving distance from my home in Bankton.

Let me be your bridge to the past.

Before I could chicken out, I clicked on the email link and sent her a message explaining my search for my birth mom. Within thirty seconds of sending it, I got a reply:

Marin, I think I can be of great help to you. Are you free tomorrow afternoon?

I did not question why this woman was online at three in the morning. I didn’t let myself wonder why a successful psychic would have an opening so quickly. Instead, I agreed to the sixty-dollar consultation fee and printed out the driving directions she gave me.

Five hours after I’d left my house that morning, I pulled into Meshinda Dows’s driveway. She lived in a tiny house that was painted purple with red trim. She was easily in her sixties, but her hair was dyed jet black and reached her waist. “You must be Marin,” she said.

Wow, already she was one for one.

She led me into a room that was divided from the foyer with a curtain made of silk scarves. Inside were two couches facing each other across a square white ottoman. On the ottoman were a feather, a fan, and a deck of cards. The shelves in the room were covered with Beanie Babies, each sealed in a small plastic bag with a heart-shaped tag protector. They looked like they were all suffocating.

Meshinda sat down, and I followed suit. “I take the money up front,” she said.

“Oh.” I dug in my purse and pulled out three twenty-dollar bills, which she folded and stuck into her pocket.

“Why don’t we start with you telling me why you’re here?”

I blinked at her. “Shouldn’t you know that?”

“Psychic gifts don’t always work that way, hon,” she said. “You’re a little nervous, aren’t you?”

“I suppose.”

“You shouldn’t be. You’re protected. You have spirits around you,” she said. She closed her eyes and squinted. “Your…grandfather? He wants you to know he’s breathing better now.”

My jaw dropped open. My grandfather had died when I was thirteen, of complications from lung cancer. I had been terrified to visit him in the hospital and see him wasting away.

“He knew something important about your birth mother,” Meshinda said.

Well, that was convenient, since Grandpa couldn’t confirm or deny that now.

“She’s thin and has dark hair,” the psychic continued. “She was very young when it happened. I’m getting an accent…”

“Southern?” I asked.

“No, not Southern…I can’t quite place it.” Meshinda looked at me. “I’m also getting some names. Strange ones. Allagash…and Whitcomb…no, make that Whittier.”

“Allagash Whittier is a law firm in Nashua,” I said.

“I think they have information. It might have been a lawyer there who handled the adoption. I’d contact them. And Maisie. Someone named Maisie has some information, too.”

Maisie was the name of the clerk of the Hillsborough County court who’d sent me my adoption decree. “I’m sure she does,” I said. “She’s got the whole file.”

“I’m talking about another Maisie. An aunt or a cousin…she adopted a baby from Africa.”

“I don’t have an aunt or a cousin named Maisie,” I said.

“You do,” Meshinda insisted. “You haven’t met her yet.” She wrinkled up her face, as if she was sucking on a lemon. “Your birth father is named Owen. He has something to do with the law.”

I leaned forward, intrigued. Was that why I’d been attracted to the career?

“He and your birth mom have had three more children.”

Whether or not that was true, I felt a pang in my chest. How come those three got to stay, but I was given away? The old adage I’d been told over and over—that my birth parents loved me but couldn’t take care of me—had never quite rung true. If they loved me so much, why had I been dispensable?

Meshinda touched a hand to her head. “That’s it,” she said. “Nothing else coming through.” She patted my knee. “That lawyer,” she advised. “That’s the place to start.”

On the way back home, I stopped off at McDonald’s to eat something and sat outside at the human Habitrail playspace that was filled with toddlers and their caregivers. I called 411 and was connected to Allagash Whittier. By telling them I was an associate with Robert Ramirez, I was able to sweet-talk my way past the paralegals to a lawyer on staff. “Marin,” the woman said, “what can I do for you?”

On the small bench where I sat, I curled a little closer into myself, to make the conversation more private. “It’s sort of a strange request,” I said. “I’m trying to find some information about a client your firm may have had in the early seventies. It would have been a young woman, around sixteen or seventeen?”

“That shouldn’t be hard to find—we don’t get too many of those. What’s the last name?”

I hesitated. “I don’t have a last name, exactly.”

The line went silent. “Was this an adoption case?”

“Well. Yes. Mine.”

The woman’s voice was frosty. “I’d suggest you try the courthouse,” she said, and she hung up.

I clutched the cell phone between my hands and watched a little boy shriek his way down a curved purple slide. He was Asian, his mother was not. Was he adopted? One day, would he be sitting here like I was, facing a dead end?

I dialed 411 again, and a moment later was connected to Maisie Donovan, the adoption search administrator for Hillsborough County. “You probably don’t remember me,” I said. “A few months ago, you sent me my adoption decree…”

“Name?”

“Well, that’s what I’m looking for…”

“I meant your name,” Maisie said.

“Marin Gates.” I swallowed. “It’s the craziest thing,” I said. “I saw a psychic today. I mean, I’m not one of those nutcases who goes to psychics or anything…not that I have a problem with that if it’s something, you know, you like to do every now and then…but anyway, I went to this woman’s house and she told me that someone named Maisie had information about my birth mother.” I forced a laugh. “She couldn’t give me much more detail, but she got that part right, huh?”

“Ms. Gates,” Maisie said flatly, “what can I do for you?”

I bowed my head toward the ground. “I don’t know where to go from here,” I admitted. “I don’t know what to do next.”

“For fifty dollars, I can send you your nonidentifying information in a letter.”

“What’s that?”

“Whatever’s in your file that doesn’t give away names, addresses, phone numbers, birth date—”

“The unimportant stuff,” I said. “Do you think I’ll learn anything from it?”

“Your adoption wasn’t through an agency; it was a private one,” Maisie explained, “so there wouldn’t be much, I imagine. You’d probably find out that you’re white.”

I thought of the adoption decree she’d sent me. “I’m about as sure of that as I am that I’m female.”

“Well, for fifty dollars, I’m happy to confirm it.”

“Yes,” I heard myself say. “I’d like that.”

After I wrote the address where I needed to send my check on the back of my hand, I hung up and watched the children bouncing around like molecules in a heated solution. It was hard for me to imagine ever having a child. It was impossible to imagine giving one up.

“Mommy!” one little girl cried out from the top of a ladder. “Are you watching?”

Last night on the message boards, I had first seen the labels a-mom and b-mom. They weren’t rankings, as I’d first thought—just shorthand for adoptive mom and birth mom. As it turned out, there was a huge controversy over the terminology. Some birth mothers felt the label made them sound like breeders, not mothers, and wanted to be called first mother or natural mother. But by that logic, my mom became the second mother, or the unnatural mother. Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who’d sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who’d cried with me over boyfriends, who’d clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother?

Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn’t just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.

Suddenly, I found myself thinking of Charlotte O’Keefe.

Piper

The patient was about thirty-five weeks into her pregnancy and had just moved to Bankton with her husband. I hadn’t seen her for any routine obstetric visits, but she’d been slotted into my schedule during my lunch break because she was complaining of fever and other symptoms that seemed to me like red flags for infection. According to the nurse who’d done the initial history, the woman had no medical problems.

I pushed open the door with a smile on my face, hoping to calm down what I was sure would be a panicking mother-to-be. “I’m Dr. Reece,” I said, shaking her hand and sitting down. “Sounds like you haven’t been feeling too well.”

“I thought it was the flu, but it wouldn’t go away…”

“It’s always a good idea to get something like that checked out when you’re pregnant anyway,” I said. “The pregnancy’s been normal so far?”

“A breeze.”

“And how long have you been having symptoms?”

“About a week now.”

“Well, I’ll give you a chance to change into a robe, and then we’ll see what’s going on.” I stepped outside and reread her chart while I waited a few moments for her to change.

I loved my job. Most of the time when you were an obstetrician, you were present at one of the most joyous moments of a woman’s life. Of course, there were incidents that were not quite as happy—I’d had my share of having to tell a pregnant woman that there’d been a fetal demise; I’d had surgeries where a placenta accreta led to DIC and the patient never regained consciousness. But I tried not to think about these; I liked to focus instead on the moment when that baby, slick and wriggling like a minnow in my hands, gasped its way into this world.

I knocked. “All set?”

She was sitting on the examination table, her belly resting on her lap like an offering. “Great,” I said, fitting my stethoscope to my ears. “We’ll start by listening to your chest.” I huffed on the metal disk—as an OB I was particularly sensitive to cold metal objects being placed anywhere on a person—and set it gently against the woman’s back. Her lungs were perfectly clear; no rasping, no rattles. “Sounds fine,” I said. “Now let’s check out your heart.”

I slid aside the neckline of the gown to find a large median sternotomy scar—the vertical kind that goes straight down the chest. “What’s that from?”

“Oh, that’s just my heart transplant.”

I raised my brows. “I thought you told the nurse that you didn’t have any medical problems.”

“I don’t,” the patient said, beaming. “My new heart’s working great.”

Charlotte didn’t start seeing me as a patient until she was trying to get pregnant. Before that, we were still just moms who made fun of our daughters’ skating coaches behind their backs; we’d save seats for each other at school parent nights; occasionally we’d get together with our spouses for dinner at a nice restaurant. But one day, when the girls were playing up in Emma’s room, Charlotte told me that she and Sean had been trying to get pregnant for a year, and nothing had happened.

“I’ve done it all,” she confided. “Ovulation predictors, special diets, Moon Boots—you name it.”

“Have you seen a doctor?” I asked.

“Well,” she said. “I was thinking about seeing you.”

I didn’t take on patients I knew personally. No matter what anyone said, you couldn’t be an objective physician if it was someone you loved lying on your operating table. You could argue that the stakes for an OB were always high—and there’s no question I gave 100 percent every time I walked into a delivery—but the stakes were just that tiny bit higher if the patient was personally connected to you. If you failed, you were not just failing your patient. You were failing your friend.

“I don’t think that’s the greatest idea, Charlotte,” I said. “It’s a tough line to cross.”

“You mean the whole you’ve-got-your-hand-up-my-cervix-now-sohow-can-you-look-me-in-the-eye-when-we-go-shopping part?”

I grinned. “Not that. Seen one uterus, seen them all,” I said. “It’s just that a physician should be able to keep her distance, instead of being personally involved.”

“But that’s exactly why you’re perfect for me,” Charlotte argued. “Another doctor would try to help us conceive but wouldn’t really give a damn. I want someone who cares beyond the point of professional responsibility. I want someone who wants me to have a baby as much as I want to.”

Put that way, how could I deny her? I called Charlotte every morning so that we could dissect the letters to the editor in the local paper. She was the first one I ran to when I was fuming at Rob and needed to vent. I knew what shampoo she used, which side of her car the gas tank was on, how she took her coffee. She was, simply, my best friend. “Okay,” I said.

A smile exploded on her face. “Do we start now?”

I burst out laughing. “No, Charlotte, I’m not going to do a pelvic exam on my living room floor while the girls are playing upstairs.”

Instead, I had her come to the office the following day. As it turned out, there was no medical reason that she and Sean were having trouble getting pregnant. We talked about how eggs decline in quality after women hit their thirties, which meant it might take longer to happen—but could still happen. I got her started on folic acid and on tracking her basal body temperature. I told Sean (in what had to have been his favorite conversation with me to date) that they should have sex more often. For six months, I tracked Charlotte’s menstrual calendar in my own appointment book; I’d call on the twenty-eighth day and ask if she’d started her period—and for six months, she had. “Maybe we should talk about fertility drugs,” I suggested, and the next month, just before her appointment with a specialist, Charlotte got pregnant the old-fashioned way.

Considering how long it took, the pregnancy itself was uneventful. Charlotte’s blood tests and urine cultures always came back clean; her blood pressure was never elevated. She was nauseated round the clock, and she’d call me after throwing up at midnight to ask why the hell it was called morning sickness.

At her eleventh week of pregnancy, we heard the heartbeat for the first time. At the fifteenth, I did a quad screen on her blood to check for neural defects and Down syndrome. Two days later, when her results came in, I drove to her house during my lunch break. “What’s wrong?” she asked, when she saw me standing at the door.

“Your test results. We have to talk.”

I explained that the quad screen wasn’t foolproof, that the test was designed specifically to have a 5 percent screen positive rate, which means that 5 percent of all women who took the test were going to be told that they had a higher than average risk of having a Down syndrome baby. “Based on your age alone, your risk is one in two hundred and seventy of having a baby with Down,” I said. “But the blood test came back saying that, actually, your risk is higher than average—it’s one in one hundred and fifty.”

Charlotte folded her arms across her chest.

“You’ve got a few options,” I said. “You’re scheduled for an ultrasound in three weeks anyway. We can take a look during that ultrasound and see if anything is a red flag. If it does show something, we can send you for a level two ultrasound. If not, we can reduce your odds again to one in two hundred and fifty, which is nearly average, and assume the test was a false reading. But just remember—the ultrasound isn’t one hundred percent peace of mind. If you want absolute answers, you’ll have to have amniocentesis.”

“I thought that could cause a miscarriage,” Charlotte said.

“It can. But the risk of that is one in two hundred and seventy—right now, less than the chance that the baby has Down syndrome.”

Charlotte rubbed a hand down her face. “So this amniocentesis,” she said. “If it turns out that the baby has…” Her voice trailed off. “Then what?”

I knew Charlotte was Catholic. I also knew, as a practitioner, that it was my responsibility to give everyone all the information I had whenever possible. What they chose to do with it, based on their personal beliefs, was up to them. “Then you can decide whether or not to terminate,” I said evenly.

She looked up at me. “Piper, I worked too hard to have this baby. I’m not going to give it up that easily.”

“You should talk this over with Sean—”

“Let’s do the ultrasound,” Charlotte decided. “Let’s just take it from there.”

For all of these reasons, I remember very clearly the first time we saw you on the screen. Charlotte was lying down on the examination table; Sean was holding her hand. Janine, the ultrasound tech who worked at my practice, was taking the measurements before I went in to read the results myself. We would be looking for hydrocephalus, an endocardial cushion defect or abdominal wall defect, nuchal fold thickening, a short or absent nasal bone, hydronephrosis, echogenic bowel, shortened humerior femurs—all markers used in the ultrasound diagnosis of Down syndrome. I made sure that the machine we used was one that had only recently arrived, brand-new, the ultimate technology at the time.

Janine came into my office as soon as she finished the scan. “I’m not seeing any of the usual suspects for Down,” she said. “The only abnormality is the femurs—they’re in the sixth percentile.”

We got readings like that all the time—a fraction of a millimeter for a fetus might look much shorter than normal and, at the next sonogram, be perfectly fine. “That could be genetics. Charlotte’s tiny.”

Janine nodded. “Yeah, I’m going to just mark it down as something to keep an eye on.” She paused. “There was something weird, though.”

My head snapped up from the file I was writing in. “What?”

“Check out the pictures of the brain when you’re in there.”

I could feel my heart sink. “The brain?”

“It looks anatomically normal. But it’s just incredibly…clear.” She shook her head. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

So the ultrasound machine was exceptionally good at its job—I could see why Janine would be over the moon, but I didn’t have time to rhapsodize about the new equipment. “I’m going to tell them the good news,” I said, and I went into the examination room.

Charlotte knew; she knew as soon as she saw my face. “Oh, thank God,” she said, and Sean leaned over to kiss her. Then she reached for my hand. “You’re sure?”

“No. Ultrasound isn’t an exact science. But I’d say the odds of having a normal, healthy baby just increased dramatically.” I glanced at the screen, a frozen image of you sucking your thumb. “Your baby,” I said, “looks perfect.”

In my office, we did not advocate recreational ultrasounds—in layman’s terms, that means ultrasounds beyond those medically necessary. But sometime in Charlotte’s twenty-seventh week, she came to pick me up to go to a movie, and I was still delivering a baby at the hospital. An hour later, I found her in my office with her feet propped on the desk as she read a recent medical journal. “This is fascinating stuff,” she said. “‘Contemporary Management of Gestational Trophoblastic Neoplasia.’ Remind me to take one of these the next time I can’t fall asleep.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think I’d be this late. She made it to seven centimeters and then stopped dead.”

“It’s no big deal. I didn’t really want to see a movie anyway. The baby’s been dancing on my bladder all afternoon.”

“Future ballerina?”

“Or placekicker, if you believe Sean.” She looked up at me, trying to read my face for clues about the baby’s sex.

Sean and Charlotte had chosen not to find out in advance. When parents told us that, we wrote it in their files. It had taken a Herculean effort for me to not peek during the ultrasound, so that I wouldn’t inadvertently give away the secret.

It was seven o’clock; the receptionist had gone home for the day; the patients were all gone. Charlotte had been allowed to wait for me only because everyone knew we were friends. “We wouldn’t have to tell him that we know,” I said.

“Know what?”

“The baby’s sex. Just because we missed the movie doesn’t mean we can’t catch another one…”

Charlotte’s eyes widened. “You mean an ultrasound?”

“Why not?” I shrugged.

“Is it safe?”

“Absolutely.” I grinned at her. “Come on, Charlotte. What have you got to lose?”

Five minutes later, we were in Janine’s ultrasound suite. Charlotte had hiked her shirt up beneath her bra, and her pants were pushed down low on her abdomen. I squirted gel onto her belly, and she squealed. “Sorry,” I said. “Cold.” Then I picked up the transducer and moved it over her skin.

The picture of you rose on the screen like a mermaid coming up to the water’s surface: black one moment, and then slowly solidifying into an image we could recognize. There was a head, a spine, your tiny hand.

I swept the transducer to a point between your legs. Instead of the crossed bones of a fetus cramped inside the womb, your soles touched each other, your legs practically forming a circle. The first break I saw was the femur. It was angulated, bent acutely, instead of being straight. On the tibia I could see a line of black, a new fracture.

“So?” Charlotte said happily, craning her neck to see the screen. “When do I get to see the family jewels?”

I swallowed, moving the transducer up to see the barrel of your chest and the beaded ribs. There were five healing fractures here.

The room started spinning around me. Still holding the transducer, I leaned forward, settling my head between my knees. “Piper?” Charlotte said, coming up on her elbows.

I had learned about osteogenesis imperfecta in medical school, but I had never actually seen a case. What I remembered about it were pictures of fetuses with in vitro fractures like yours. Fetuses that died at birth or shortly after.

“Piper?” Charlotte repeated. “Are you okay?”

Pulling myself upright, I drew in a deep breath. “Yes,” I said, my voice breaking. “But Charlotte…your daughter’s not.”

Sean

The very first time I heard the words osteogenesis imperfecta was after Piper drove Charlotte home, hysterical, from that off-the-cuff ultrasound in Piper’s office. With Charlotte sobbing in my arms, I tried to make sense of the words Piper was lobbing at me like missiles: collagen deficiency, bones angulated and thickened, beaded ribs. She had already called a colleague, Dr. Del Sol, who was a high-risk maternal-fetal-medicine physician at the hospital. We had an appointment for another ultrasound at 7:30 a.m.

I had just come home from work—a construction detail that had been hellish because it had rained the entire afternoon and evening. My hair was still damp from the shower, my shirt sticking to the damp skin of my back. Amelia was upstairs watching TV in our bedroom, and I had been holding a container of ice cream, eating right out of it with a spoon, when Piper and Charlotte came into the house. “Damn,” I said. “You caught me right in the act.” Then I realized that Charlotte was crying.

It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye. Take the mother who was handing a toy to her toddler in the backseat one moment, and in a massive motor vehicle accident the next. Or the frat boy who was chugging a beer on the porch as we drove up to arrest him for sexually assaulting another student. The wife who opened the door to find a police officer bearing the news of her husband’s death. In my job, I’d often been present at the transition when the world as you knew it became the disaster you never expected—but I had not been on the receiving end before.

My throat felt like it had been lined with cotton. “How bad?”

Piper looked away. “I don’t know.”

“This osteopatho—”

“Osteogenesis imperfecta.”

“How do you fix it?”

Charlotte had drawn back from me, her face swollen, her eyes red. “We can’t,” she said.

That night, after Piper had left and Charlotte had finally fallen into a fitful sleep, I got on the Internet and Googled OI. There were four types, plus three more that had recently been identified, but only two of them showed fractures in utero. Type II infants would die before birth, or shortly after. Type III infants would survive but could have rib fractures that caused life-threatening breathing problems. Bone abnormalities would get worse and worse. These children might never walk.

Other words started jumping off the screen:

Wormian bones. Codfish vertebrae. Intramedullary rodding.

Short stature—some people grow only three feet tall.

Scoliosis. Hearing loss.

Respiratory failure is the most frequent cause of death, followed by accidental trauma.

Because OI is a genetic condition, it has no cure.

And

When diagnosed in utero, the majority of these pregnancies end in pregnancy interruption.

Below this was a photograph of a dead infant who’d had Type II OI. I could not tear my eyes away from the knotted legs, the shifted torso. Was this what our baby looked like? If so, wasn’t it better to be stillborn?

At that thought, I squeezed my eyes shut, and prayed to God that He hadn’t been listening. I would have loved you if you’d been born with seven heads and a tail. I would have loved you if you never drew breath or opened your eyes to see me. I already loved you; that didn’t stop just because there was something wrong with the way your bones were made.

I quickly cleared the search history so that Charlotte wouldn’t accidentally bring up the photograph when she was surfing the Net, and moved upstairs quietly. I stripped in the dark and slid into bed beside your mother. When I wrapped my arms around her, she shifted closer to me. I let my hand fall over the swell of her belly just as you kicked, as if to tell me not to worry, not to believe a word I read.

The next day, after another ultrasound and an X-ray, Dr. Gianna Del Sol met us in her office to go over the report. “The ultrasound showed a demineralized skull,” she explained. “Her long bones are three standard deviations off the mean, and they’re angulated and thickened in a way that shows both healing fractures and new ones. The X-ray gave us a better picture of the rib fractures. All of this indicates that your baby has osteogenesis imperfecta.”

I felt Charlotte’s hand slip underneath mine.

“Based on the fact that we’re seeing multiple fractures, it seems like we’re talking about Type II or Type III.”

“Is one worse than the other?” Charlotte asked. I looked into my lap, because I already knew the answer to that.

“Type IIs normally do not survive after birth. Type IIIs have significant disabilities and sometimes early mortality.”

Charlotte burst into tears again; Dr. Del Sol passed her a box of tissues.

“It’s very hard to tell whether an infant has Type II or Type III. Type II can sometimes be diagnosed by ultrasound at sixteen weeks, Type III at eighteen. But every case is different, and your earlier ultrasound didn’t reveal any fractures. Because of that, we can’t give you an entirely accurate prognosis—beyond the fact that the best-case scenario is going to be severe, and the worst case will be lethal.”

I looked at her. “So even when you think it’s Type II, and that a baby has no chance of survival, it might beat the odds?”

“It’s happened,” Dr. Del Sol said. “I read a case study about parents who were given a lethal prognosis yet chose to continue the pregnancy and wound up with an infant with Type III. However, Type III kids are still severely disabled. They’ll have hundreds of breaks over the course of their lives. They may not be able to walk. There can be respiratory issues and joint problems, bone pain, muscle weakness, skull and spinal deformities.” She hesitated. “There are places that can help you, if termination is something you want to consider.”

Charlotte was twenty-seven weeks into her pregnancy. What clinic would do an abortion at twenty-seven weeks?

“We’re not interested in termination,” I said, and I looked at Charlotte for confirmation, but she was facing the doctor.

“Has there ever been a baby born here with Type II or Type III?” she asked.

Dr. Del Sol nodded. “Nine years ago. I wasn’t here at the time.”

“How many breaks did that baby have when it was born?”

“Ten.”

Charlotte smiled then, for the first time since last night. “Mine only has seven,” she had said. “So that’s already better, right?”

Dr. Del Sol hesitated. “That baby,” she said, “didn’t survive.”

One morning, when Charlotte’s car was being serviced, I took you to physical therapy. A very nice girl with a gap between her teeth whose name was Molly or Mary (I always forgot) made you balance on a big red ball, which you liked, and do sit-ups, which you didn’t. Every time you curled up on the side of your healing shoulder blade, your lips pressed together, and tears would streak from the corners of your eyes. I don’t even think you knew you were crying, really—but after watching this for about ten minutes, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I told Molly/Mary that we had another appointment, a flat lie, and I settled you in your wheelchair.

You hated being in the chair, and I couldn’t say I blamed you. A good pediatric wheelchair was best when it was fitted well, because then you were comfortable, safe, and mobile. But they cost over $2800, and insurance would pay for one only every five years. The wheelchair you were riding in these days had been fitted to you when you were two, and you’d grown considerably since then. I couldn’t even imagine how you’d squeeze into it at age seven.

On the back of it, I had painted a pink heart and the words HANDLE WITH CARE. I pushed you out to the car and lifted you into your car seat, then folded the wheelchair into the back of the van. When I slid into the driver’s seat and checked you in the rearview mirror, you were cradling your sore arm. “Daddy,” you said, “I don’t want to go back there.”

“I know, baby.”

Suddenly I knew what I would do. I drove past our exit on the highway, to the Comfort Inn in Dover, and paid sixty-nine dollars for a room I had no plans to use. Strapped in your wheelchair, I pushed you to the indoor pool.

It was empty on a Tuesday morning. The room smelled heavily of chlorine, and there were six chaise lounges in various states of disrepair scattered around. A skylight was responsible for the dance of diamonds on the surface of the water. A stack of green and white striped towels sat on a bench beneath a sign: SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK.

“Wills,” I said, “you and I are going swimming.”

You looked at me. “Mom said I can’t, until my shoulder—”

“Mom isn’t here to find out, is she?”

A smile bloomed on your face. “What about our bathing suits?”

“Well, that’s part of the plan. If we stop off home to get our suits, Mom’ll know something’s up, won’t she?” I stripped off my T-shirt and sneakers, and stood before you in a pair of faded cargo shorts. “I’m good to go.”

You laughed and tried to get your shirt over your head, but you couldn’t lift your arm high enough. I helped, and then shimmied your shorts down your legs so that you were sitting in the wheelchair in your underpants. They said THURSDAY on the front, although it was Tuesday. On the butt was a yellow smiley face.

After four months in the spica cast, your legs were thin and white, too reedy to support you. But I held you under the armpits as you walked toward the water and then sat you down on the steps. From a supply bin against the far wall, I took a kid’s life jacket and zipped it onto you. I carried you in my arms to the middle of the pool.

“Fish can swim at sixty-eight miles an hour,” you said, clutching at my shoulders.

“Impressive.”

“The most common name for a goldfish is Jaws.” You wrapped your arm around my neck in a death grip. “A can of Diet Coke floats in a pool. Regular Coke sinks…”

“Willow?” I said. “I know you’re nervous. But if you don’t close your mouth, a lot of water’s going to go into it.” And I let go.

Predictably, you panicked. Your arms and legs started pinwheeling, and the combined force flipped you onto your back, where you splashed and stared up at the ceiling. “Daddy! Daddy! I’m drowning!”

“You’re not drowning.” I lifted you upright. “It’s all about those stomach muscles. The ones you didn’t want to work on today at therapy. Think about moving slowly and staying upright.” More gently this time, I released you.

You bobbled, your mouth sinking under the water. Immediately, I lunged for you, but you righted yourself. “I can do it,” you said, maybe to me and maybe to yourself. You moved one arm through the water, and then the other, compensating for the shoulder that was still healing. You bicycled your legs. And incrementally, you came closer to me. “Daddy!” you shouted, although I was only two feet away. “Daddy! Look at me!”

I watched you moving forward, inch by inch. “Look at you,” I said, as you paddled under the weight of your own conviction. “Look at you.”

“Sean,” Charlotte said that night, when I thought she might have already fallen asleep beside me, “Marin Gates called today.”

I was on my side, staring at the wall. I knew why the lawyer had phoned Charlotte: because I hadn’t answered the six messages she’d left on my cell, asking me whether I had returned the signed papers agreeing to file a wrongful birth lawsuit—or if they’d somehow gotten lost in the mail.

I knew exactly where those papers were: inside the glove compartment of my car, where I’d shoved them after Charlotte handed them to me a month ago. “I’ll get around to it,” I said.

Her hand lighted on my shoulder. “Sean—”

I rolled onto my back. “You remember Ed Gatwick?” I asked.

“Ed?”

“Yeah. Guy I graduated from the academy with? He was on the job in Nashua. Responded to a call last week about suspicious activity at a residence, made by a neighbor. He told his partner he had a bad feeling about it, but he went inside, just in time for the meth lab in the kitchen to blow up in his face.”

“How awful—”

“My point being,” I interrupted, “that you should always listen to your gut.”

“I am,” Charlotte said. “I did. You heard what Marin said. Most of these cases settle out of court anyway. It’s money. Money that we could put to good use for Willow.”

“Yeah, and Piper becomes the sacrificial lamb.”

Charlotte got quiet. “She has malpractice insurance.”

“I don’t think that protects her against backstabbing by her best friend.”

She drew the sheet around her, sitting up in bed. “She would do it if it was her daughter.”

I stared at her. “I don’t think she would. I don’t think most people would.”

“Well, I don’t care what other people think. Willow’s opinion is the only one that counts,” Charlotte said.

That, I realized, was the reason that I hadn’t signed those damn papers. Like Charlotte, I was only thinking of you. I was thinking of the moment you realized that I wasn’t a knight in shining armor. I knew it would happen eventually—that’s what growing up is all about. But I didn’t want to rush it. I wanted to be your champion for as long as I could keep you believing in me.

“If Willow’s opinion is the only one that counts,” I said, “how are you going to explain to her what you’re doing? I mean, you want to lie on the witness stand—say you would have aborted her—that’s up to you. But to Willow, it might sound a hell of a lot like the truth.”

Tears sprang to Charlotte’s eyes. “She’s smart. She’ll understand that it doesn’t matter what it looks like on the surface. She’ll know deep down that I love her.”

It was a catch-22. My refusal to sign those papers didn’t mean Charlotte wouldn’t try to proceed without me. If I refused to sign those papers, the rift between the two of us would hurt you, too. But what if Charlotte’s prediction came true—that the money we’d get as a payout would go a long way toward justifying whatever wrong we’d done to get it? What if this lawsuit made it possible for you to have any adaptive aid you needed, any therapy not covered by insurance?

If I really wanted what was best for you, how could I sign those papers?

How could I not?

Suddenly, I wanted to make Charlotte see how this was tearing me up inside. I wanted her to feel the same sick knot that I felt every time I opened up my glove compartment and saw that envelope. It was like Pandora’s box—she had opened it, and what had flown out but a solution to a problem we never imagined could be solved. Closing the lid now wouldn’t change anything; we couldn’t unlearn what we now knew to be possible.

I guess, if I was being honest, I wanted to punish her for putting me into this situation, where there was no black and white but a thousand shades of gray.

She was surprised when I grabbed her and kissed her. She backed away at first, looking at me, and then leaned into my body, trusting me to take her down a dizzy road where I’d taken her a thousand times before. “I love you,” I said. “Do you believe that?”

Charlotte nodded, and as soon as she did, I tightened my fingers in her hair, forcing her head back and pinning her to the mattress. “Sean, you’re crushing me,” she whispered, and I covered her mouth with one hand and roughly ripped aside her pajama bottoms with the other. I forced my way inside her, even as she fought against me, even as I watched her back arch with surprise and maybe pain, even as her eyes filled with tears. “Doesn’t matter what it looks like on the surface,” I whispered, her own words striking her like a whip. “You know deep down that I love you.”

I had started this wanting to make Charlotte feel like crap, but somehow, I wound up feeling like crap myself. So I rolled off her, yanking up my boxers. Charlotte turned away, curling into a ball. “You bastard,” she sobbed. “You fucking bastard.”

She was right; I was one. I had to be, or I wouldn’t have been able to do what I did next: walk out to the car and get those papers from the glove compartment. Sit in the dark in the kitchen the whole of the night, staring at them, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something more acceptable. Knock down a shot of whiskey for each of the lines where Marin Gates had placed a little yellow Post-it arrow, pointing to the space where my signature was supposed to be.

I fell asleep at the kitchen table, waking before the sun did. When I tiptoed into the bedroom, Charlotte was still sleeping. She was on her side curled like a snail, the sheet and comforter balled at the bottom of the bed. I pulled them over her gently, the way I sometimes did for you when you’d kicked your blankets loose.

I left the papers, signed in all the right places, on the pillow beside her. With a note paper-clipped to the top. I’m sorry, I had written. Forgive me.

Then I drove to work, wondering the whole time whether that message had been intended for Charlotte, for you, or for myself.

Amelia

Late August 2007

Let’s just say right off the bat that we lived in the sticks, and although my parents seemed to think this was going to be a huge benefit to me later in life (Why? Because I’d know what green grass smelled like firsthand? Because we didn’t have to lock our front door?), I for one wished I’d had a vote when it came to settling down. Do you have any idea what it’s like not to be able to get a cable modem when even Eskimos have them? Or to go shopping for school clothes at Wal-Mart because the nearest mall is an hour and a half away? Last year in social studies, when we were studying cruel and unusual punishment, I wrote a whole essay about living where the retail opportunities were somewhere between zero and nil, and although everyone in my class totally agreed with me, I only got a B, because my teacher was the kind of Birkenstock-granola hippie who thought Bankton, New Hampshire, was the best place on earth.

Today, though, all the planets must have aligned, because my mother had agreed to road-trip to Target with you and Piper and Emma.

It had been Piper’s idea—right before the school year started she occasionally decided to do a mother-daughter shopping extravaganza. My mother usually had to be persuaded to come along, because we never seemed to have enough cash. Inevitably, Piper would wind up buying things for me, and my mother would feel guilty and swear she was never going shopping with Piper again. What’s the big deal? Piper would say. I like making the girls happy. What’s the big deal indeed? If Piper wanted to pad my wardrobe, I wasn’t about to deny her that one small joy.

When Piper called this morning, though, I thought my mother would jump at the opportunity. You had once again managed to outgrow a pair of shoes without ever wearing them. Usually it was just one or the other—the left one got used while the right foot was stuck in a cast for a few months—but with the spica you’d worn this spring, both your feet had managed to grow a whole size, and the soles of your old shoes were barely even scuffed. Now—six months later, when you were officially learning to walk again—it had taken my mother a week to figure out that the reason you winced every time she made you use the walker to get to the bathroom by yourself had nothing to do with pain in your legs but actually with your feet being stuffed into too-tight sneakers.

To my surprise, my mother didn’t want to go. She had been in a really weird mood; she had practically leapt out of her skin when I came up behind her while she was drinking a cup of coffee and reading some legal papers that looked totally boring and full of words like IN RE and WHOSOEVER. And when Piper called and I handed her the phone, Mom dropped it twice. “I can’t,” I heard her tell Piper. “I’ve got some really important errands to run.”

“Please, Mom?” I said, dancing around in front of her. “I promise, I won’t even take a stick of gum from Piper. Not like last time.”

Something I said must have struck a chord, because she looked down at those papers and then up at me. “Last time,” she repeated absently, and the next thing I knew, we were on our way to Concord, to go shopping. My mother was still a little out of it, but I didn’t notice. Piper’s van had a DVD system, and you and Emma and I had wireless headphones on so that we could listen to 13 Going on 30, which is the best movie ever. The last time I’d watched it had been at our house, and Piper had done the whole “Thriller” dance along with Jennifer Garner, leading Emma to proclaim that she just wanted to die of embarrassment on the spot, even though I secretly thought it was really cool that Piper could remember all the steps.

Two hours later, Emma and I were running through the juniors’ section. Even though most of the styles seemed to have been made by Skanky Ho Enterprises, with V-necks that reached down to the belly button and pants so low-rise they could have been kneesocks, it was exciting to shop in an area that wasn’t the kids’ section. Across the aisle, Piper was pushing your wheelchair, navigating aisles that were completely not made for disabled people. Meanwhile, my mother—whose mood had deteriorated, if possible—kept kneeling down to try shoes on your feet. “Did you know those plastic thingies on the ends of the shoelaces are called aglets?” you asked.

“As a matter of fact I did,” she said, exasperated, “because you told me the last time we did this.”

I watched Emma reach up on her tiptoes to take down a blouse that would, as my mother would say, show the entire world your business. “Emma!” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding!”

“You wear it with a camisole,” she said, and I pretended I had known that all along. The truth is that Emma could probably put that on and look like she was sixteen, because she was already five-five, and tall and thin like her mother. I didn’t wear camisoles. It was just too depressing to know that the roll at my belly stuck out farther than my boobs.

I slipped my hand into the pocket of my sweatshirt. Inside was a plastic Ziploc bag. I’d been carrying them around for the past week. Twice now I’d made myself sick in places that weren’t bathrooms—once behind the gym at school, once in Emma’s kitchen, when she was upstairs looking for a CD. I’d do it when it got to the point where it was all I could think about—Would I be found out? Would it stop the ache in my belly?—and the only way to make it go away was to just give in and do it already, except after it happened, I hated myself for not holding out.

“This would look good on you,” Emma said, holding up a pair of sweatpants big enough for an elephant.

“I don’t like yellow,” I said, and I wandered across the aisle.

Piper and my mother were in the middle of a conversation. Well, that’s not really accurate. Piper was in the middle of a conversation and my mother was physically present in the same general space. She was zoned out, nodding at the right times but not really listening. She thought she could fool people, but she wasn’t that great an actress. Take you, for example. How many fights had she had with Dad about whether or not to hire a lawyer, while you were sitting in the next room? And then, when you asked why they were arguing, she’d insist they weren’t. Did she really think you were so incredibly involved in Drake & Josh episodes that you weren’t hanging on every word?

I wished she’d listen. I wished she could hear the things you asked me when we were lying in bed at night, before we fell asleep: Amelia, will we all live here forever? Amelia, will you help me brush my teeth, so I don’t have to ask Mom to do it? Amelia, can your parents ever send you back to the place you came from?

Was it any wonder that I found myself staring in the mirror at my disgusting face and even more disgusting body? My mother was going to a lawyer to sue over a kid who had turned out less than perfect.

“Where’s Emma?” Piper asked.

“In the juniors’ section, scoping out tops.”

“Decent ones, or the tight kind that look like ads for porn?” Piper asked. “Some of the clothing they make for kids your age must be illegal.”

I laughed. “Emma could always hire a lawyer. We know a good one.”

“Amelia!” my mother cried out. “Look what you made me do!” But she said this before she managed to knock over the entire display of blouses.

“Oh, shoot,” Piper said, hurrying to fix the racks. Over her head, my mother gave me a tight-lipped shake of her head.

She was angry at me, and I didn’t even know why. I slipped through the forest of girls’ clothing, my hands spread to brush against the vines of pant legs and sleeves. I ducked my head as I passed by Emma again. What had I done wrong?

Then again, what didn’t I do wrong?

It was almost like she was mad I had brought up the lawyer in front of Piper. But Piper was her best friend. This legal thing was front and center in our house, like a dinosaur at the dinner table that we all pretended wasn’t sticking its big, slimy face into the mashed potatoes. She couldn’t have forgotten to mention it to Piper, could she?

Unless…she very intentionally hadn’t.

Was this why she hadn’t wanted to go shopping with Piper? Why we hadn’t recently dropped by Piper’s house when we were in the neighborhood, the way we used to? When my mother talked about damages and getting enough money to really take care of you the way that would help you the most, I hadn’t really given much thought to the person who’d be on the receiving end of the lawsuit.

If it was the doctor she had been seeing when she was pregnant…well, that was Piper.

Suddenly I wasn’t the only person in my mother’s life who had turned out to be a disappointment. But instead of feeling let off the hook, I just felt sick.

I stood up, turning corners blindly, until I found myself standing in the lingerie section. I was crying by then, and just my luck, the only Target employee who was on the floor instead of the cash registers happened to be standing right in front of me. “Hon?” she asked. “Are you okay? Are you lost?”

As if I were five years old and had been separated from my mother. Which, actually, was not all that far off the mark.

“I’m fine,” I said, ducking my head. “Thanks.” I pushed past her, heading through the bras, even as one got caught on my sleeve. It was pink and silky, with brown polka dots. It looked like the kind of thing Emma would wear.

Instead of putting it back on its hanger, I stuffed it into my pocket, next to my Ziploc bags. I curled my fingers around it and checked to see whether the employee had been watching. The satin was cold between my fingers. I could swear it was pulsing, a secret heartbeat.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” the woman asked again.

“Yes,” I said, the lie coming easily, reminding me that, even as much as I hated her right now, I was my mother’s daughter.

Piper

September 2007

I’ve always said that the best part of my job is that I don’t do the work: that’s up to the prospective mother, and I basically monitor what’s going on and keep it running smoothly.

“Okay, Lila,” I said, removing my hand from between her legs. “We’re at ten centimeters. Almost there. You’ve got to push for me now.”

She shook her head. “You do it,” she muttered.

She’d been in labor for nineteen hours; I completely understood why she wanted to pass the buck. “You are so beautiful,” her husband crooned, holding up her shoulders.

“You are so full of shit,” Lila snarled, but as a contraction settled over her like a net, she bore down and pushed. I could see the fetal head swelling closer, and I held up my hand to keep it from popping out too fast and tearing the perineum. “Again,” I urged. This time, the fetal head rushed forward like a tide, and as the mouth and nose broke the seal of Lila’s skin, I suctioned them. The rest of the head was delivered, and I slipped the cord over it, supporting it as I turned the baby to control the shoulders. Five seconds later, the baby was balanced in the scale of my hands. “It’s a boy,” I said, as he announced, with a healthy cry, his own presence.

The cord was clamped, and Lila’s husband cut it. “Oh, baby,” he said, kissing her on the mouth.

“Oh, baby,” Lila echoed, as her newborn son was settled in her arms by the labor nurse.

I smiled and resumed my position at the foot of the birthing chair. Now came the unceremonious part of the happy event: waiting around for the placenta to present itself like a late houseguest; checking the vagina, cervix, and vulva for lacerations and repairing them if necessary; doing a digital rectal exam. To be honest, the parents were usually so engrossed in the newest addition to their family, some women didn’t even notice what was going on below their waists anymore.

Ten minutes later I congratulated the couple, stripped off my gloves, washed my hands, and headed outside to begin filling out the mountain of paperwork. I had barely taken two steps outside the patient’s door, though, when a man wearing jeans and a polo shirt approached. He looked lost, like a father who was staggering into the birthing pavilion to locate his wife. “Can I help you?” I asked.

“Are you Dr. Reece? Dr. Piper Reece?”

“Guilty as charged.”

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out what looked like a folded blue brochure, which he handed to me. “Thanks,” he said, and he turned on his heel.

I opened the document and saw the words WRONGFUL BIRTH ACTION.

Birth of an unhealthy child.

Parents’ right to recover is based on the defendant’s negligent deprivation of the parents’ right not to conceive a child or to prevent the child’s birth.

Medically negligent.

Defendant failed to exercise due care.

Plaintiffs suffered injury or loss.

I had never been sued before, although, like every other obstetrician, I had medical malpractice insurance. On some level, I’d known that my lack of lawsuits was sheer luck—that it would happen sooner or later. I just hadn’t expected it to feel like such a personal affront.

There had certainly been tragedies during my career—babies that were stillborn, mothers whose complications during childbirth led to excessive bleeding and even brain death. I carried those incidents with me, every day; I didn’t need a lawsuit to make me revisit them over and over, and wonder what could have been done differently.

Which disaster had precipitated this? My eyes scanned to the top of the page again, reading the plaintiffs’ names, which I’d somehow missed the first time around.

SEAN AND CHARLOTTE O’KEEFE v. PIPER REECE.

Suddenly I couldn’t see. The space between my eyes and the paper was washed red, like the blood that was pounding so loudly in my ears that I did not hear a nurse ask if I was all right. I staggered down the hall to the first door I could find—into a supply closet filled with gauze and linens.

My best friend was suing me for medical malpractice.

For wrongful birth.

For not telling her earlier about your disease, so that she would have had the chance to abort the child she’d begged me to help her conceive.

I sank down onto the floor and cradled my head in my hands. One week ago, we’d driven down to Target with the girls. I’d treated her to lunch at an Italian bistro. Charlotte had tried on a pair of black pants and we’d laughed about low-rise waistbands and how there should be support thongs for women over forty. We’d bought Emma and Amelia matching pajamas.

We’d spent seven hours together in close quarters, and not once had she managed to mention that she was in the process of suing me.

I pulled my cell phone out of the clip at my waist and speed-dialed her—number 3, outranked only by Home and Rob’s office. “Hello?” Charlotte answered.

It took me a moment to find my voice. “What is this?”

“Piper?”

“How could you? Everything was fine for five years, and all of a sudden out of nowhere you slap a lawsuit on me?”

“I really don’t think we should be talking on the phone—”

“For God’s sake, Charlotte. Do I deserve this? What did I ever do to you?”

There was a beat of silence. “It’s what you didn’t do,” Charlotte said, and the line went dead.

Charlotte’s medical records were back at my office, a ten-minute drive from the hospital birthing pavilion. As I entered, my receptionist glanced up. “I thought you were at a delivery,” she said.

“It’s over.” I walked past her, into the records room, and pulled Charlotte’s file, then headed back outside to my car.

I sat in the driver’s seat with the file in my lap. Don’t think of this as Charlotte, I told myself. This is just any other patient. But when I tried to bring myself to open the manila folder with the bright tabs on the edge, I couldn’t do it.

I drove to Rob’s practice. He was the only orthodontist in Bankton, New Hampshire, and pretty much had a monopoly on the adolescent market there, but he still went out of his way to make the dental experience something kids would enjoy. In one corner of the office was a projection TV, where a generic teen comedy was currently playing. There was a pinball machine and a computer station where patients could play video games. I walked up to his receptionist, Keiko. “Hi, Piper,” she said. “Wow, I don’t think we’ve seen you here in a good six months—”

“I need to see Rob,” I interrupted. “Now.” I grasped the file in my hands more tightly. “Can you tell him I’ll meet him in his office?”

Unlike my office, which was all the colors of the sea and designed to put a woman at ease, in spite of the plaster models of fetal development that dotted the shelves like little Buddhas, Rob’s was luxurious, paneled, masculine. He had an enormous desk, mahogany bookshelves, Ansel Adams prints on the wall. I sat down in his tufted leather chair and spun it around once. I felt small here. Inconsequential.

I did the one thing I’d wanted to do for two hours now: burst into tears.

“Piper?” Rob said as he came in to find me sobbing. “What’s the matter?” He was at my side in a second, smelling of toothpaste and coffee as he folded me into his embrace. “Are you okay?”

“I’m being sued,” I managed. “By Charlotte.”

He drew back. “What?”

“Med mal. For Willow.”

“I don’t get it,” Rob said. “You weren’t even at the delivery.”

“This is about what happened before.” I glanced down at the file, still on the desk. “The diagnosis.”

“But you did diagnose it. You referred her to the hospital when you found out.”

“Apparently, Charlotte thinks I should have been able to tell her earlier—because then she could have had an abortion.”

Rob shook his head. “Okay, that’s ridiculous. They’re die-hard Catholics. Remember that time you and Sean started arguing about Roe v. Wade and he left the restaurant?”

“That doesn’t matter. I have other patients who are Catholic. You counsel termination no matter what, if it’s an option. You don’t make the decision for the couple, based on your own assumptions about them.”

Rob hesitated. “Maybe this is about money.”

“Would you ruin your best friend’s reputation as a doctor just to get a settlement?”

Rob glanced down at the file. “If I know you, you documented every last detail of Charlotte’s pregnancy in there, right?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, what does it say in the file?”

“I…can’t open it. You do it, Rob.”

“Sweetheart, if you don’t remember, it’s probably because there’s nothing to remember. This is crazy. Just look through the file, and turn it over to the malpractice carrier. That’s what you have insurance for, right?”

I nodded.

“Do you want me to stay with you?”

I shook my head. “I’m okay,” I said, even though I didn’t believe it. As the door closed behind him, I took a deep breath and opened the manila folder. I started at the very beginning, with Charlotte’s medical history.

Not to be confused, I thought to myself, with our personal history.

HEIGHT: 5'2''

WEIGHT: 145

Patient has been trying unsuccessfully to conceive for a year.

I flipped the page—lab results that confirmed pregnancy; the blood tests for HIV, syphilis, hep B, anemia; urinalysis that screened for bacteria, sugar protein. All had been normal, until the quad screen, and the elevated risk for Down syndrome.

The eighteen-week ultrasound had been part of routine pregnancy care, but I’d also been looking to confirm Down syndrome. Had I been so focused on that one task I never thought to look for any other anomalies? Or had they simply not been there?

I pored over the ultrasound report, scrutinized the pictures for any inkling of a break that I might have missed. I stared at the spine, at the heart, at the ribs, at the long bones. A fetus with OI might have had breaks at that point in time, but the collagen defect in the bones would have made them even more difficult to see. You couldn’t really fault a physician for not red-flagging something that appeared, for all intents and purposes, normal.

The last image on the ultrasound report was of the fetal skull.

I flattened my hands on either side of the page, pinning down a picture of the brain that was sharp and focused.

Crystal clear.

Not because of the quality of our new equipment, as I’d assumed at the time, but because of a demineralized calvarium, a skull that had not ossified correctly.

As physicians, we’re taught to look for things that are abnormal—not things that are too perfect.

Had I known back then, long before I knew you and your illness, that a demineralized calvarium was a hallmark of OI? Should I have known? Had I pushed down gently on Charlotte’s belly, to see if the fetal skull gave way to the pressure? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember anything, except telling her that her baby didn’t seem to have Down syndrome.

I couldn’t remember if I’d taken measures that I could point to, now, that could be used to prove this wasn’t my fault.

I reached into my pocketbook and took out my wallet. Buried in the very bottom, among the gum wrappers and the pens from pharma companies, was a rubber-banded stack of business cards I had accumulated. I shuffled through them until I found the one I was looking for. Picking up Rob’s phone, I dialed the law firm’s number.

“Booker, Hood and Coates,” the receptionist said.

“I’m one of your medical malpractice clients,” I replied. “And I think I need your help.”

That night, I could not sleep. I went into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror, trying to see if I already looked different than I had when the day had begun. Could you see doubt written on a face? Did it settle in the fine lines around the eyes, the bracket of the mouth?

Rob and I had decided not to tell Emma what had happened, at least not until there was something concrete to tell. It occurred to me that Amelia might mention something now that school had started up again—but then, maybe Amelia didn’t know what her parents were doing, either.

I sat down on the toilet seat and looked at the moon. Full, orange, it seemed to be balanced on the windowsill. The light spilled into the bathroom and across the tile floor, pooling in the bowl of the tub. It wouldn’t be long before dawn, and then I would be expected to go to work and take care of patients who were pregnant or trying to become pregnant, when I could no longer be sure of my own judgment.

The few times I’d been so upset that I couldn’t sleep—like after my father died, and when my office manager stole several thousand dollars from the practice—I’d called Charlotte. Although I was the one who was used to being phoned in the middle of the night for an emergency, she hadn’t complained. She’d acted as if she’d been expecting me to call, and even though I knew she had a thousand things to do the next day with Willow or Amelia, she’d stay up with me for hours, talking about everything and nothing, until my mind stopped racing long enough for me to relax.

I was licking my wounds, and I wanted to call my best friend. Except this time, she was the one who’d caused them.

A daddy longlegs was crawling up the wall. It left me almost breathless. Everything I knew about physics and gravity told me that it should be tumbling to the ground. The closer it got to the ceiling, the more I was riveted. It tucked two legs around the curl at the top of the wallpaper, where the strip had begun peeling off.

I’d asked Rob to fix it a thousand times; he’d ignored me. But now that I was looking at it—really looking—I realized I didn’t like this wallpaper at all. What we needed was a fresh start. A good, new coat of paint.

I stood on the lip of the tub, reached up with my right hand, and in one swift pull, tore away a long tongue of wallpaper.

Most of the strip, though, was still affixed to the wall.

What did I know about removing wallpaper?

What did I know about anything?

I needed a steamer. But at three in the morning, I wasn’t going to get one, so I turned on the hot-water faucets in the bath and the sink, letting steam cloud the room. I tried to curl my fingernails under the edges, to scrape the strip free.

There was a sudden rush of cold air. “What the hell are you doing?” Rob asked, bleary, standing in the doorway.

“Stripping the wallpaper.”

“In the middle of the night? Piper,” he sighed.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

He turned off the taps. “You have to try.” Rob led me by the hand back to bed, where I lay down and drew the covers over me. I curled onto my side, and he fitted his arm around my waist.

“I could redo the bathroom,” I whispered when his even breathing told me he was asleep again.

Charlotte and I had spent one day last summer reading every kitchen and bath makeover magazine in the Barnes & Noble racks. Maybe you should go minimalist, Charlotte had suggested, and then, turning the page, French provincial?

Get an air tub, she’d suggested. A TOTO toilet. A heated towel rack.

I’d laughed. A second mortgage?

When I met with Guy Booker at the law firm, would he take inventory of this house? Of our mutual funds and retirement accounts and Emma’s college savings and all the other assets that could be taken away in a settlement?

Tomorrow, I decided, I would get one of those steamers. And whatever other tools I needed to strip wallpaper. I would fix it all myself.

“I think I dropped the ball,” I admitted as I sat across from Guy Booker at a gleaming, imposing conference table.

My lawyer reminded me of Cary Grant—white hair with a raven’s wing of color at the temples, tailored suit, even that little divot in his chin. “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” he said.

He had told me that we had twenty days to file an answer to the complaint I’d been served—a formal pleading for the court. “You say that osteogenesis imperfecta can be diagnosed by a woman’s twentieth week of pregnancy?” he asked.

“Yes—the lethal kind, anyway, by ultrasound.”

“Yet the patient’s daughter survived.”

“Right,” I said. Thank God.

I liked that he was referring to Charlotte as “the patient.” It made it feel more clinical. It was one step farther away.

“So she’s got the severe type—Type III.”

“Yes.”

He flipped through the file again. “The femur was in the sixth percentile?”

“Right. That’s documented.”

“But it’s not a definitive marker for OI.”

“It can mean all sorts of things. Down syndrome, skeletal dysplasia…or a short parent, or the fact that we took a bad measurement. A lot of fetuses with standard deviations like Willow’s at eighteen weeks go on to be perfectly healthy. It’s not until a later ultrasound, when that number falls off the charts, that we know we’re dealing with some abnormality.”

“So your advice would have been to wait and see, regardless?”

I stared at him. Put that way, it didn’t seem like I’d made a mistake. “But the skull,” I said. “My technician pointed it out—”

“Did she say to you that she thought there might be a medical issue?”

“No, but—”

“She said it was a very clear picture of the brain.” He looked up at me. “Yes, your ultrasound technician called attention to something unusual—but not necessarily symptomatic. It might have been a technical issue with the machine, or the position of the transducer, or just a damn good scan.”

“But it wasn’t,” I said, feeling tears claw at the back of my throat. “It was OI, and I missed it.”

“You’re talking about a procedure that isn’t a conclusive test for the presence of OI. Or in other words, had the patient been seeing another physician instead of you, the same thing would have happened. That’s not malpractice, Piper. That’s sour grapes, on the part of the parents.” Guy frowned. “Do you know of any physician who would have diagnosed OI based on the eighteen-week ultrasound of a demineralized calvarium, a shortened femur, and no obvious skeletal fractures?”

I glanced down at the table. I could nearly see my own reflection. “No,” I admitted. “But they would have sent Charlotte for further testing—a more advanced ultrasound, and a CVS.”

“You’d already suggested further testing once to the patient,” Guy pointed out. “When her quad screen came back with a greater chance of having a Down syndrome baby.”

I met his gaze.

“You advised amniocentesis then, didn’t you? And what was her response?”

For the first time since I’d been handed that little blue folder, I felt the knot in my chest release. “She was going to have Willow no matter what.”

“Well, Dr. Reece,” the lawyer said. “That sure as hell doesn’t sound to me like wrongful birth.”

Charlotte

I started lying all the time.

At first it was just tiny white lies: responses to questions like “Ma’am, are you okay?” when the dental receptionist called my name three times and I didn’t hear her; or when a telemarketer phoned and I said that I was too busy to do a survey, when in fact I’d been sitting at the kitchen table staring into space. Then I began to lie in earnest. I’d cook a roast for dinner, completely forget it was in the oven, and tell Sean as he sawed through the blackened char that it clearly was the shoddy cut of meat the market had started stocking. I’d smile at neighbors and tell them, when they asked, that we were all doing well. And when your kindergarten teacher called me up and asked me to come to school because there had been an incident, I acted as if I had no idea what might have upset you in the first place.

When I arrived, you were sitting in the empty classroom in a tiny chair beside Ms. Watkins’s desk. The transition to public school had been less divine than I’d expected it to be. Yes, you had a full-time aide paid for by the state of New Hampshire, but I had to argue every last right for you—from the ability to go to the bathroom by yourself to the chance to interact in gym class when the play wasn’t too strenuous and you weren’t in danger of suffering a break. The good news was that this took my mind off the lawsuit. The bad news was that I wasn’t allowed to stay and make sure you were doing all right. You were in a classroom with new kids who didn’t know you—and who didn’t know about OI. When I asked you after your first day what you did in school, you told me how you and Martha played with Cuisenaire rods, how you were on the same team for Capture the Flag. I’d been thrilled to hear about this new friend and asked if you wanted to invite her over to the house. “I don’t think she can, Mom,” you told me. “She has to cook dinner for her family.”

As far as I knew, the only friend you’d made in this class was your aide.

Your eyes flickered toward me when I shook the teacher’s hand, but you didn’t speak. “Hi, Willow,” I said, sitting down beside you. “I hear you had a little trouble today.”

“Do you want to tell your mom what happened, or should I?” Ms. Watkins asked.

You folded your arms and shook your head.

“Willow was invited to participate in some imaginary play with two children this morning.”

My face lit up. “But—that’s terrific! Willow loves to pretend.” I turned to you. “Were you being animals? Or doctors? Space explorers?”

“They were playing house,” Ms. Watkins explained. “Cassidy was role-playing the mom; Daniel was the dad—”

“And they wanted me to be the baby,” you exploded. “I’m not a baby.”

“Willow’s very sensitive about her size,” I explained. “We like to say she’s just space-efficient.”

“Mom, they kept saying that because I was littlest I had to be the baby, but I didn’t want to be the baby. I wanted to be the dad.”

This, I could tell, was news to Ms. Watkins, too. “The dad?” I said. “How come you didn’t want to be the mom?”

“Because moms go into the bathroom and cry and turn on the water so no one can hear them.”

Ms. Watkins looked at me. “Mrs. O’Keefe,” she said, “why don’t you and I talk for a moment outside?”

For five whole minutes we drove in silence. “It is not okay for you to trip Cassidy when she walks by you for snack.” Although I did have to give you some credit for ingenuity—there wasn’t much you could do to hurt someone without also hurting yourself, and this was a pretty clever, if diabolical, tactic. “The last thing you want, Willow, is for Ms. Watkins to think you’re a troublemaker after one week of school.”

I did not tell you that, when we had gone into the hall and Ms. Watkins asked if there was something going on at home that might lead to you acting out in school, I had flat-out lied. “No,” I said, after pretending to think a minute. “I can’t imagine where she got that from. But then again, Willow’s always had a remarkable imagination.”

“Well?” I prompted, still waiting for some recognition from you that you’d crossed a line you shouldn’t have. “Do you have something you want to say?”

I glanced in the rearview mirror for your response. You nodded, your eyes full of tears. “Please don’t get rid of me, Mommy.”

If I hadn’t been paused at a stoplight, I probably would have crashed into the car in front of me. Your narrow shoulders were shaking; your nose was running. “I’ll be better,” you said. “I’ll be perfect.”

“Oh, Willow, honey. You are perfect.” I felt trapped by my seat belt, by the ten seconds it took for the light to change. As soon as it did, I pulled into the first side street I could. I turned off the ignition and slipped into the backseat to take you out of your car seat. It had been adapted, like your infant car bed—this was upright but foam lined the straps, because otherwise even braking could cause a fracture. I gently untangled you and rocked you in my arms.

I had not talked to you about the lawsuit. I told myself that I was trying to keep you blissfully ignorant for as long as possible—much the same reason I hadn’t told Ms. Watkins about it. But the longer I put off this conversation, the greater the likelihood you’d find out about it from a classmate, and I couldn’t let that happen.

Had I really been trying to protect you? Or had I just been protecting myself? Would this be the moment I’d point to, months from now, as the beginning of the unraveling between us: yes, we were sitting on Appleton Lane, under a sugar maple, the moment that my daughter started to hate me.

“Willow,” I said, my throat suddenly so dry that I could not swallow. “If anyone’s been bad, it’s me. Do you remember when we went to visit that lawyer after your breaks at Disney World?”

“The man or the lady?”

“The lady. She’s going to help us.”

You blinked. “Help us do what?”

I hesitated. How was I supposed to explain the legal system to a five-year-old? “You know how there are rules?” I said. “At home, and at school? What happens if someone breaks those rules?”

“They get a time-out.”

“Well, there are rules for grown-ups, too,” I said. “Like, you can’t hurt someone. And you can’t take something that’s not yours. And if you break the rules, you get punished. Lawyers can help you if someone breaks a rule and hurts you in the process. They make sure that the person who did something wrong takes responsibility.”

“Like when Amelia stole my glitter nail polish and you made her buy me another one with her babysitting money?”

“Exactly like that,” I said.

Your eyes welled up again. “I broke the rules in school and the lawyer’s going to make me move out of the house,” you said.

“No one is moving,” I said firmly. “Especially not you. You didn’t break the rules. Someone else did.”

“Is it Daddy?” you asked. “Is that why he doesn’t want you to get a lawyer?”

I stared at you. “You heard us talking about that?”

“I heard you yelling about it.”

“It wasn’t Daddy. And it wasn’t Amelia.” I took a deep breath. “It was Piper.”

“Piper stole something from our house?”

“This is where it gets complicated,” I said. “She didn’t steal a thing, like a television or a bracelet. She just didn’t tell me something that she should have. Something very important.”

You looked down at your lap. “It was something about me, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “But it’s nothing that would ever change the way I feel about you. There’s only one Willow O’Keefe on this planet, and I was lucky enough to get her.” I kissed the top of your head, because I wasn’t brave enough to look you in the eye. “It’s a funny thing, though,” I said, my voice knotting around a rope of tears. “In order for this lawyer to help us, I have to play a game. I have to say things I don’t really mean. Things that might hurt if you heard them and didn’t know I was really just acting.”

Now I watched your face carefully to see if you were following me. “Like when someone gets shot on TV but not in real life?” you said.

“Right,” I said. They’re fake bullets, so why do I still feel like I’m bleeding out? “You’re going to hear things, and maybe read things, and you’ll think to yourself, My mom would never say that. And you’d be right. Because when I’m in court, talking to that lawyer, I’m pretending to be someone else, even though I look the same and my voice sounds the same. I might fool everyone else in the world, but I don’t want to fool you.”

You blinked up at me. “Can we practice?”

“What?”

“So I can tell. If you’re acting or not.”

I drew in my breath. “Okay,” I said. “You were absolutely right to trip Cassidy today.”

You stared at me fiercely. “You’re lying. I wish you weren’t, but you’re lying.”

“Good girl. Ms. Watkins needs to pluck her unibrow.”

A smile fluted across your face. “That’s a trick question, but you’re still lying, because even if she really does look like there’s a caterpillar between her eyes, that’s something Amelia would say out loud but not you.”

I burst out laughing. “Honestly, Willow.”

“True!”

“But I didn’t say anything yet!”

“You don’t have to say I love you to say I love you,” you said with a shrug. “All you have to do is say my name and I know.”

“How?”

When I looked down at you, I was struck by how much of myself I could see in the shape of your eyes, in the light of your smile. “Say Cassidy,” you instructed.

“Cassidy.”

“Say…Ursula.”

“Ursula,” I parroted.

“Now…,” and you pointed to your own chest.

“Willow.”

“Can’t you hear it?” you said. “When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it’s safe inside your mouth.”

“Willow,” I repeated, feeling the pillow of the consonants and the swing of the vowels. Were you right? Could it drown out everything else I would have to say? “Willow, Willow, Willow,” I sang; a lullaby, a parachute, as if I could cushion you even now from whatever blows were coming.

Marin

October 2007

You have never seen anything like the amount of time and dead trees that go into a civil lawsuit. Once, during a suit brought against a priest for sexual assault, I had sat through a deposition of a psychiatrist that went on for three days. The first question was: What is psychology? The second: What is sociology? The third: Who was Freud? The expert was getting paid $350 an hour and wanted to make damn sure he took his time. I think we lost three stenographers to carpal tunnel syndrome before we finally got his answers on record.

It was eight months since I’d first met with Charlotte O’Keefe and her husband, and we were still in the learning phase. Basically, it involved the clients going about their everyday lives and, every now and then, getting a call from me saying that I needed this document or that information. Sean was promoted to lieutenant. Willow started full-day kindergarten. And Charlotte spent the seven hours that Willow was in school waiting for the phone to ring, in case her daughter had another break.

Part of getting ready for the depositions involved questionnaires called interrogatories that help lawyers like me see the strengths and weaknesses of the case, and whether or not it should settle. Discovery is aptly named: you are meant to find out if your case is a loser, and where the black holes are, before you’re sucked into them.

Piper Reece’s interrogatory had landed in my inbox this morning. I’d heard, through the grapevine, that she had taken a leave of absence from her practice and had her mentor come out of retirement to cover for her.

This entire lawsuit was predicated on the assumption that she had not told Charlotte about her baby’s medical condition early on—had not given her information that might have led to terminating the pregnancy. And there was a little piece of me that wondered if it had been an oversight on the obstetrician’s part or a subconscious slip. Were there obstetricians who—instead of recommending abortions—suggested adoption? Had one of them taken care of my own mother?

I had finally received my nonidentifying letter from Maisie in the Hillsborough County Court Records Office. Dear Ms. Gates, the letter had read.

The following information has been compiled from the court record of your adoption. Information in the record indicates the birth mother’s obstetrician contacted his attorney seeking advice for a patient who was considering adoption. The attorney was aware of the Gateses’ interest in adopting. The attorney met with the birth parents after you were born and made arrangements for the adoption.

You were born in a Nashua hospital at 5:34 p.m. on January 3, 1973. You were discharged from the hospital on January 5, 1973, into the care of Arthur and Yvonne Gates. Their adoption of you became final on July 28, 1973, in Hillsborough County Court.

Information recorded on the original birth certificate indicates the birth mother was seventeen when she gave birth to you. She was a Hillsborough County resident at the time. She was Caucasian, and her occupation was Student. The birth father was not identified on the birth certificate. At the time of the adoption, she was living in Epping, NH. The adoption petition identifies your religious affiliation as Roman Catholic. The birth mother and maternal grandmother signed a consent to your adoption.

Please feel free to contact me if I can be of any additional assistance.

Sincerely, Maisie Donovan

I realized that the point of the nonidentifying letter was to give information that wasn’t specific—but there were so many other things I wanted to know instead. Had my father and mother broken up during the pregnancy? Had my mother been scared, in that hospital by herself? Had she held me even once, or just let the nurse take me away?

I wondered if my adoptive parents, who had raised me decidedly Protestant, had known I was born Catholic.

I wondered if Piper Reece had figured that, if Charlotte O’Keefe didn’t want to raise a child like Willow, someone else might be more than happy to have the chance.

Clearing my head, I picked up the interrogatory she’d filled out and flipped through the pages to read her side of the story. My questions had begun generically and then gotten more medically specific at the end of the document. The first one, in fact, had been a complete softball: When did you first meet Charlotte O’Keefe?

I scanned the answer and blinked, certain I’d read that wrong.

Picking up the phone, I called Charlotte. “Hello?” she said, breathless.

“It’s Marin Gates,” I said. “We need to talk about the interrogatories.”

“Oh! I’m so glad you called. There must be a mistake, because we got one with Amelia’s name on it.”

“That’s not a mistake,” I explained. “She’s listed as one of our witnesses.”

“Amelia? No, that’s impossible. There is no way she’s testifying in court,” Charlotte said.

“She can describe the quality of life in your family, and how OI has affected her. She can talk about the trip to Disney World, and how traumatic it was to be taken out of your custody and put in a foster home—”

“I don’t want her having to relive that—”

“She’ll be a year older by the time the trial starts,” I said. “And she may not need to be called as a witness. She’s listed just in case, as protocol.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t even tell her, then,” Charlotte murmured, which reminded me why I had called in the first place.

“I need to talk to you about Piper Reece’s interrogatory,” I said. “On it, I asked her when she first met you, and she said that you had been best friends for eight years.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line.

“Best friends?”

“Well,” Charlotte said. “Yes.”

“I’ve been your lawyer for eight months,” I said. “We’ve met half a dozen times in person and talked three times that much on the phone. And you never thought it might be the tiniest bit important to give me that little detail?”

“It has nothing to do with the case, does it?”

“You lied to me, Charlotte!” I said. “That has a hell of a lot to do with the case!”

“You didn’t ask me if I was friends with Piper,” Charlotte argued. “I didn’t lie.”

“It’s a lie of omission.”

I picked up Piper’s interrogatory and read out loud. “‘In all of the years we’ve been friends, I never had any indication that Charlotte felt this way about her prenatal care. In fact, we had been shopping together with our daughters a week before I got served with what I feel is a baseless lawsuit. You can imagine how shocked I was.’ You went shopping with this woman the week before you sued her? Do you have any idea how cold-blooded that’s going to look to a jury?”

“What else did she say? Is she doing all right?”

“She’s not working. She hasn’t worked for two months,” I said.

“Oh,” Charlotte said, her voice small.

“Look, I’m a lawyer. I’m well aware that my job requires destroying the lives of people. But you apparently have a personal connection to this woman, in addition to a professional one. It’s not going to make you sympathetic.”

“Neither is telling a court that I didn’t want Willow,” Charlotte said.

Well, I couldn’t argue with that.

“You may get what you want out of this lawsuit, but it’s going to come at a great cost.”

“You mean everyone’s going to think I’m a bitch,” Charlotte said. “For screwing my best friend. And for using my child’s illness to get money. I’m not stupid, Marin. I know what they’re going to say.”

“Is that going to be a problem?”

Charlotte hesitated. “No,” she said firmly. “No, it’s not.”

She’d already confessed to having problems getting her husband on board with this lawsuit. Now I’d found out that she had a hidden history with the defendant. What you didn’t tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did; I only had to look as far as my stupid nonidentifying letter to feel it firsthand.

“Charlotte,” I said, “no more secrets.”

The purpose of a deposition is to find out what happens to a person when he or she is thrown into the trenches of a courtroom. Conducted by the opposing party’s lawyer, it involves trying to impeach a potential witness’s credibility based on statements in the interrogatories. The more honest—and unflappable—a person is, the better your case begins to look.

Today, Sean O’Keefe was being deposed, and it scared me to death.

He was tall, strong, handsome—and a wild card. Of all the face-to-face meetings I’d had with Charlotte to prepare, he’d come to only one. “Lieutenant O’Keefe,” I had asked, “are you committed to this lawsuit?”

He had glanced at Charlotte, and an entire conversation had unraveled between them in utter silence. “I’m here, aren’t I?” he had said.

It was my belief that Sean O’Keefe would rather be drawn and quartered than led to a witness stand for this trial, which should not really have been my problem—except it was. Because he was Willow’s father, and if he screwed up on the stand, my case would be ruined. For this suit to succeed, the malpractice lawyers needed to believe that, when it came to wrongful birth, the O’Keefes presented a united front.

Charlotte, Sean, and I rode up in the elevator together. I had specifically scheduled the deposition during the hours you were in school, so child care wasn’t an issue. “Whatever you do,” I said, last-minute quarterbacking, “don’t relax. They’re going to lead you down the path to hell. They’ll twist your words.”

He grinned. “Go ahead, make my day.”

“You can’t play Dirty Harry with these guys,” I said, panicking. “They’ve seen it before, and they’ll trap you with your own bravado. Just remember to keep calm, and to count to ten before you answer anything. And—”

The elevator doors opened before I could finish my sentence. We stepped into the luxurious offices, where a paralegal in a fitted blue suit was already waiting. “Marin Gates?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Mr. Booker’s expecting you.” She led us down the hall to the conference room, a panorama of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out toward the golden dome of the Statehouse. Tucked into one corner was the stenographer. Guy Booker was deep in conversation, his silver head bent. He stood up as we approached, revealing his client.

Piper Reece was prettier than I expected. She was blond, lanky, with dark circles underneath her eyes. She wasn’t smiling; she stared at Charlotte as if she’d just been run through with a sword.

Charlotte, on the other hand, was doing everything possible not to look at her.

“How could you?” Piper accused. “How could you do this?”

Sean narrowed his eyes. “You’d better stop right there, Piper—”

I stepped between them. “Let’s just get this over with, all right?”

“You have nothing to say?” Piper continued, as Charlotte settled herself at the table. “You don’t even have the decency to look me in the eye and tell me off to my face?”

“Piper,” Guy Booker said, putting a hand on her arm.

“If your client is going to be verbally abusive to mine,” I announced, “we’ll walk out of here right now.”

“She wants abusive?” Sean muttered. “I’ll show her abusive…”

I grabbed his arm and pulled him down into a chair. “Shut up,” I whispered.

It was perhaps the first and only time in my life that I would ever have anything in common with Guy Booker—neither one of us relished being present at this deposition. “I’m quite sure my client can restrain herself,” he said, facing Piper as he stressed the last two words. He turned to the stenographer. “Claudia, you ready to get started?”

I looked at Sean and mouthed the word calm. He nodded and cracked his neck on each side, like a prizefighter readying to head into the ring.

That snap, that audible pop: it made me think of you, breaking a bone.

Guy Booker opened a leather folder. It was buttery, most likely Italian. Part of the reason Booker, Hood & Coates won so many cases was the intimidation factor—they looked like winners, from their opulent offices to their Armani suits and their Waterman pens. They probably even had their legal pads hand-made and watermarked with their corporate seal. Was it any wonder that half the opponents threw in the towel after a single glance?

“Lieutenant O’Keefe,” he said. His voice was smooth, no friction between the words. I’m your pal, I’m your buddy, his tone suggested. “You believe in justice, don’t you?”

“It’s why I’m a police officer,” Sean answered proudly.

“Do you think lawsuits can bring about justice?”

“Sure,” Sean said. “It’s the way this country works.”

“Would you consider yourself particularly litigious?”

“No.”

“I guess you must have had good reason, then, to sue Ford Motor Company in 2003?”

Shocked, I turned toward Sean. “You sued Ford?”

He was scowling. “What does that have to do with my daughter?”

“You received a settlement, didn’t you? Of twenty thousand dollars?” He leafed through his leather folder. “Can you explain the nature of the complaint?”

“I slipped a disk in my back, sitting in the cruiser seat the whole day. Those things are designed for crash test dummies, not real humans doing their jobs.”

I closed my eyes. It would have been really nice, I thought, if either of my clients had been honest with me.

“About Willow,” Guy said. “How many hours per day would you say you spend with her?”

“Maybe twelve,” he said.

“Of those twelve hours, how many is she asleep?”

“I don’t know, eight, if it’s a good night.”

“If it’s not a good night, how many times would you say you have to get up with her?”

“It depends,” Sean said. “Once or twice.”

“So the amount of time you’re with her, and not trying to get her back to sleep—that’s probably about four or five hours a day?”

“Sounds fair.”

“During those hours, what do you and Willow do?”

“We play Nintendo. She beats the pants off me at Super Mario. And we play cards…” He blushed a little. “She’s a natural at Five-Card Stud.”

“What’s her favorite TV show?” Guy asked.

“Lizzie McGuire, this week.”

“Favorite color?”

“Magenta.”

“What kind of music does she listen to?”

“Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers,” Sean said.

I could remember sitting on the couch with my mother and watching The Cosby Show. We’d make a bowl of microwave popcorn and eat the entire thing. It had never been the same after Keshia Knight Pulliam had gotten too old and had been supplanted by Raven-Symone. If I had been raised by my birth mother, would my childhood have been colored differently? Would we have been hooked on soap operas, PBS documentaries, Dynasty?

“I hear Willow goes to kindergarten now.”

“Yeah, she just started two months ago,” Sean said.

“Does Willow have a good time in school?”

“It’s hard for her sometimes, but I’d say she enjoys it.”

“No one’s denying that Willow is a child with disabilities,” Guy said, “but those disabilities don’t prevent her from having a positive educational experience, do they?”

“No.”

“And they don’t prevent her from sharing good times with your family, do they?”

“Absolutely not.”

“In fact, would you say as Willow’s father that you’ve done a good job making sure she has a good, rich life?”

Oh, no, I thought.

Sean sat up a little straighter, proud. “Damn right I have.”

“Then why,” Guy asked, going in for the kill, “are you saying that she should never have been born?”

The words went through Sean like a bullet. He jerked forward, flattening his hands on the table. “Don’t you put words in my mouth. I never said that.”

“Actually, you did.” Guy took a copy of the complaint from his folder and slid it across the table toward Sean. “Right here.”

“No.” Sean set his jaw.

“Your signature on this document represents the truth, Lieutenant.”

“Hey, listen, I love my daughter.”

“You love her,” Guy repeated. “So much that you think she’d be better off dead.”

Sean reached for the complaint and crumpled it in his hand. “I’m not doing this,” he said. “I don’t want this; I never wanted this.”

“Sean…” Charlotte stood up and grabbed his arm, and he rounded on her.

“How can you say this won’t hurt Willow?” he said, the words torn from his throat.

“She knows these are only words, Sean, words that don’t mean anything. She knows we love her. She knows that’s why we’re here.”

“Guess what, Charlotte,” he said. “Those are only words, too.” And with that, he strode out of the conference room.

Charlotte stared after him, and then at me. “I-I have to go,” she said. I stood up, not sure if I was supposed to follow her out or stay and try to patch up the damage with Guy Booker. Piper Reece was red-faced, staring into her lap. Charlotte’s low heels sounded like gunshots as she hurried down the hallway.

“Marin,” Guy said, leaning back in his chair. “You can’t possibly think you’ve got a viable case here.”

I could feel a bead of sweat running between my shoulder blades. “Here’s what I know,” I said, with much more conviction than I actually possessed. “You just saw firsthand how this illness has ripped their family apart. Seems to me a jury will see that, too.”

I gathered my notes and my briefcase and walked down the hall with my head high, as if I actually believed what I’d said. And only when I was in the elevator alone, and the doors had shut behind me, did I close my eyes and admit that Guy Booker was right.

My cell phone started to ring.

“Shit,” I muttered, wiping my eyes, digging in my briefcase to answer it. Not that I wanted to: it was either Charlotte, apologizing for what had to be the biggest debacle of my career so far, or Robert Ramirez, firing me because bad news travels fast. But no number flashed on the screen; it was a private caller. I cleared my throat. “Hello?”

“Is this Marin Gates?”

“Speaking.”

The elevator doors opened. On the far side of the lobby, I could see Charlotte pleading with Sean, who was shaking his head.

For a moment I almost forgot I was still on the phone. “This is Maisie Donovan,” a reedy voice said. “I’m the clerk of—”

“I know who you are,” I said quickly.

“Ms. Gates,” she replied, “I have your birth mother’s current address.”

Amelia

I had been waiting for the bomb to drop. The best part of the stupid lawsuit was that it had been filed just as school was starting, when who was hooking up with whom was far more interesting than some random legal battle, so the news hadn’t spread through the halls like electricity through a conductor. We’d been back for two months now, studying vocabulary and slogging through assemblies on boring topics by boring people and sitting for the NECAP tests, and every day when the last bell rang I marveled at the fact that I’d somehow gotten another reprieve.

Needless to say, Emma and I hadn’t been hanging out. On the first day of school, I’d cornered her when we were headed into the gym. “I don’t know what my parents are doing,” I’d said. “I always said they were aliens, and this only proves it.” Normally that would have made Emma laugh, but instead she just shook her head. “Yeah, that’s really funny, Amelia,” she said. “Remind me to crack jokes the next time someone you trust screws you over.”

After that, I’d been too embarrassed to say anything to her. Even if I told her that I was on her side, and that I thought it was ridiculous my parents were suing her mother, why would she believe me? If I were in her shoes, I’d assume that I was spying, and that anything I said could be used against me. She didn’t tell people what had gone wrong between us—after all, that would embarrass her, too—so I figured she just said that we’d had a huge fight. And here’s what I learned when I kept my distance from Emma: that the people I had always assumed were my friends actually had been Emma’s, and just suffering my presence. I can’t say it surprised me to find this out, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t hurt when I was holding my lunch tray and walked by the table where they were all sitting, without anyone making room. Or when I took out my PB and J sandwich, which had as usual gotten crushed by my math textbook in my locker so that the jelly was oozing through like blood on a crime victim’s clothing, and didn’t have Emma to say, Here, have half of my tuna fish.

After a few weeks, I had nearly gotten used to being invisible. In fact, I’d gotten quite skilled at it. I would sit in class so quiet and still that sometimes I could get flies to land on my hands; I slouched at the back of the bus so low that, one day, the driver headed back toward the school without even bothering to pull over at my stop. But one morning, I walked into homeroom and immediately knew something was different. Janet Efflingham’s mother worked as a receptionist at a law firm and had told everyone about a big stinking fight my parents had had in a conference room there during a deposition. The whole school knew that my mother was suing Emma’s.

I would have thought this put Emma and me right back into the same sorry, pathetic lifeboat, but I had forgotten that the best defense is a good offense. I was sitting in math class, which was the hardest one for me, because my chair was behind Emma’s and we used to pass notes back and forth (Doesn’t Mr. Funke look hotter now that he’s getting divorced? Did Veronica Thomas get breast implants over the long Columbus Day weekend or what?), when Emma decided to go public—and take the collective sympathy of the school with her.

Mr. Funke had a transparency up on the screen. “So if we’re talking about twenty percent of Millionaire Marvin’s earnings, and he’s made six millon dollars this year, what’s the amount of alimony he has to pay to Whining Wanda?”

That’s when Emma said, “Ask Amelia. She knows all about being a gold digger.”

Somehow, Mr. Funke seemed oblivious to the comment—although everyone else started snickering, and I could feel my cheeks burning. “Maybe it would help if your asshole mother learned how to do her stupid job,” I shot back.

“Amelia,” Mr. Funke said sharply. “Go down to Ms. Greenhaus.”

I stood up and grabbed my backpack—but the front pocket where I kept my pencils and my lunch money was still open, and a rain of pennies and quarters and dimes scattered over the floor in front of my desk. I almost knelt down to pick them up but then figured everyone would find that even more hilarious—a money-grubber’s daughter grubbing money?—and instead I just left all the coins behind and fled.

I had no intention of going to the principal’s office. Instead, I turned right when I should have turned left and walked toward the gym. During the day, the phys ed staff left the double doors open for ventilation. I panicked for only a moment about a teacher seeing me leave the school, then remembered that no one noticed me. I wasn’t important enough.

Outside, I slung my backpack over my shoulders and started running. I ran across the soccer field and through the trees that lined the neighborhood closest to the school. I ran until I came to the main road that cut through town, and then I finally let myself slow down.

The CVS pharmacy was the last building you came to if you were heading out of town, and don’t think I hadn’t considered it. I wandered through the aisles. I slipped a Snickers bar into my pocket. And then I saw something even better.

The only problem with being invisible in school was that, when I came home, I could still see myself. I could run hard and fast and never escape that.

My parents, they didn’t seem to want the kids they had. So maybe I’d just offer up one who was completely different.

Charlotte

“I was on a website this morning,” I argued, “and a girl with Type III broke her wrist trying to lift up a half gallon of milk, Sean. How can you say that Willow’s not going to need some kind of special care or live-in help? And where’s that money going to come from?”

“So she buys two quarts of milk instead,” Sean said. “We always said we weren’t going to let her define herself by her disability—but here you are, doing just that.”

“The ends justify the means.”

Sean pulled into our driveway. “Yeah. Tell that to Hitler.” He turned off the ignition; in the back, I could hear the soft sound of your snoring; whatever you’d done in school today had completely knocked you out. “I don’t know you,” he said quietly. “I don’t understand the person who’s doing this.”

I had tried to calm him down after the deposition at Piper’s lawyer’s office—the deposition that never actually happened—but he was having none of it. “You say you’d do anything for Willow, but if you can’t do this, then you’re lying to yourself,” I said.

“I’m lying,” Sean repeated. “I’m lying? You’re lying. Or at least you say you are, and that Willow will understand that all those awful things you say in front of a judge, well, you never meant them. Or at least I hope to God you’re lying, because otherwise you lied to me all those years ago about wanting to keep the baby.”

We both got out of the car; I slammed the door harder than I had to. “It’s so damn convenient to be high and mighty when you’re living in the past, isn’t it? What about ten years from now? You’re telling me that when Willow’s got a state-of-the-art wheelchair, and she’s enrolled in a summer camp for Little People, when she’s got a pool in the backyard so she can build up her bone mass and muscles and a car adapted for her to drive like other kids her age, when it doesn’t matter if the insurance company refuses to pay for another set of braces because we can always cover it ourselves without you having to work double shifts—you’re telling me that she’s going to remember what was said in a courtroom when she was just a baby?”

Sean stared at me. “Yeah. Actually, I am.”

I took a step away from him. “I love her too much to let this opportunity go.”

“Then you and I,” Sean said, “have very different ways of showing love.”

He reached into the back and unbuckled your car seat. Your face was flushed; you slowly swam out of your dreams. “I’m out, Charlotte,” Sean said simply as he carried you into the house. “You do what you have to, but don’t drag me down with you.”

I thought, not for the first time, that, under any other circumstance, a fight like this would have led me directly to Piper. I would have called her and given her my side of the story and not Sean’s. I would have felt better, knowing she’d listened.

And I would have done what I learned directly from you: let time heal the break that had somehow come between your father and me, a fracture that hurt no matter which way we turned.

“What the hell?” Sean asked, and I glanced up to find Amelia standing in the front hallway.

She was eating an apple, and her hair had been dyed an unnatural electric blue. She smirked at me. “Rock on,” she said.

You stared at her. “Why does Amelia have cotton candy on her head?”

I sucked in my breath. “I can’t do this now,” I said, “I just can’t.” And I walked up the stairs as if each step was made of glass.

During the last eight weeks of my pregnancy, there were three seconds every morning that were perfect. I’d float to the surface of consciousness, and for those few blissful moments, I would have forgotten. I’d feel the slow roll of you, the snare drum of your kicks, and I’d think everything was going to be fine.

Reality always dropped like a curtain: that kick might have fractured your leg yet again. That turn you’d completed inside me could have hurt you. I’d lie very still on my pillow and wonder if you would die during delivery, or moments after. Or whether we would be lucky enough to win the jackpot: you’d survive, and be severely disabled. It was no small irony, I thought, that if your bones broke, so did my heart.

Once, I had a nightmare. I had given birth and no one would talk to me, tell me what was going on. Instead, the obstetrician and the anesthesiologist and the nurses all turned their backs on me. “Where’s my baby?” I demanded, and even Sean shook his head and backed away. I struggled to a sitting position until I could look down between my legs and see it: what should have been a baby was just a pile of shattered crystal; between the shards I could see your tiny fingernails, a bloom of brain, an ear, a loop of intestine.

I had woken up, screaming; it took hours to fall back asleep. That next morning, when Sean woke me up, I said I could not get out of bed. And I meant it: I was certain that the very act of living, for me, would be a threat to your survival. With every step I took you might be jarred; by contrast, with care, I might keep you from breaking apart.

Sean had called Piper, who showed up at the house and talked to me about the logistics of pregnancy the way she’d describe them to a small child: the amniotic sac, the fluid, the cushion between my body and yours. I knew all this, of course, but then again, I thought I’d known other things that had turned out to be wrong: that bones grew stronger, not weaker; that a fetus not having Down syndrome must mean it was otherwise healthy. She told Sean maybe I just needed a day to sleep this off, and she’d check back in with me later. But Sean was still worried, and after calling in sick to work, he phoned our priest.

Father Grady, apparently, made house calls. He sat down on a chair that Sean brought into the bedroom. “I hear you’re a little worried.”

“That’s an understatement,” I said.

“God doesn’t give people burdens they can’t handle,” Father Grady pointed out.

That was all very well and good, but what had my baby done to piss Him off? Why would she have to prove herself by being hurt, before she even got here?

“I’ve always believed that He saves truly special babies for parents He trusts,” Father Grady said.

“My baby might die,” I said flatly.

“Your baby might not stay in this world,” he corrected. “Instead, she’ll get to be with Jesus.”

I felt tears in my eyes. “Well, let Him have someone else’s baby.”

“Charlotte!” Sean said.

Father Grady looked down at me with wide, warm eyes. “Sean thought maybe it would help if I came over to bless the baby. Do you mind?” He lifted his hand, left it hovering over my abdomen.

I nodded; I was not about to turn down a blessing. But as he prayed over the hill of my belly, I silently said my own prayer: Let me keep her, and you can take everything else I have.

He left me with a holy card propped on my nightstand and promised to pray for us. Sean walked him back downstairs, and I stared at that card. Jesus was stretched across the crucifix. He had suffered pain, I realized. He knew what it was like to feel a nail breaking through your skin, shattering the bone.

Twenty minutes later, dressed and showered, I found Sean sitting at the kitchen table cradling his head in his hands. He looked so beaten, so helpless. I was so busy worrying about this baby myself, I had not seen what he was going through. Imagine making a career out of protecting people, and then not being able to rescue your own unborn child. “You’re up,” he said the obvious.

“I thought maybe I’d go for a little walk.”

“Good. Fresh air. I’ll come with you.” He stood too quickly, rattling the table.

“You know,” I said, trying to smile, “I need to be by myself.”

“Oh—right. No problem,” he said, but he looked a little wounded. I could not understand the physics of this situation: we were in the thickest, most suffocating mess together; how could we possibly feel so far apart?

Sean assumed I needed to clear my head, think, reflect. But Father Grady’s visit had gotten me wondering about a woman who’d stopped going to our church a year ago. She lived a half mile down the street, and from time to time I saw her putting out her garbage. Her name was Annie, and all I knew about her was that she’d been pregnant, and then one day she wasn’t, and after that, she never came to Mass again. The rumor was that she’d had an abortion.

I had grown up Catholic. I had been taught by nuns. There were girls who’d gotten pregnant, but they either disappeared from the class rosters or left for a semester abroad, returning quieter and skittish. But in spite of this, I’d voted Democratic ever since I turned eighteen. It might not be my personal choice, but I thought women ought to have one.

These days, though, I was wondering if it wasn’t my personal choice because I was Catholic, or simply because I had never been forced to make it in practice, instead of theory.

Annie’s house was yellow, with fairy-tale trim and gardens that were full of day lilies in the summertime. I walked up to the front door and knocked, wondering what I would say to her if she answered. Hi, I’m Charlotte. Why did you do it?

It was a relief when no one answered; this was feeling more and more like a stupid idea. I’d started back down the driveway when suddenly I heard a voice behind me. “Oh, hi. I thought I heard someone on the porch.” Annie was wearing jeans, a sleeveless red shirt, and gardening gloves. Her hair was caught up in a knot on the back of her head, and she was smiling. “You live up the road, don’t you?”

I looked at her. “There’s something wrong with my baby,” I blurted.

She folded her arms across her chest, and the smile vanished from her face. “I’m sorry,” she said woodenly.

“The doctors told me that if she lives—if—she’s going to be so sick. So, so sick. And I’m not supposed to think about it, but I don’t understand why it’s a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.” I wiped my face with my sleeve. “I can’t tell my husband. I can’t tell him I’ve even thought about this.”

She scuffed at the ground with her sneaker. “My baby would have been two years, six months, and four days old today,” she said. “There was something wrong with her, something genetic. If she lived, she would have been profoundly retarded. Like a six-month-old, forever.” She took a deep breath. “It was my mother who talked me into it. She said, Annie, you can barely take care of yourself. How are you going to take care of a baby like that? She said, You’re young. You’ll have another one. So I gave in, and my doctor induced me at twenty-two weeks.” Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. “Here’s what no one tells you,” she said. “When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.” She looked up at me. “You can’t win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don’t have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn’t do the wrong thing. But I don’t feel like I did the right thing, either.”

There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met.

“They gave me a choice,” Annie said, “and even now, I wish they hadn’t.”

Amelia

That night, I let you brush my hair and stick scrunchies all over it. Usually, you just made massive knots and annoyed me, but you loved doing it—your arms were too short for you to manage even a ponytail yourself, so when other girls your age were playing around with their hair and putting in ribbons and braids, you were stuck at the mercy of Mom, whose braiding experience was limited to challah. Don’t go thinking I’d suddenly developed a conscience or anything—I just felt bad for you. Mom and Dad had been yelling about you as if you weren’t there ever since they’d come home. I mean, for God’s sake, your vocabulary was better than mine half the time—they couldn’t possibly think this had all gone over your head.

“Amelia?” you asked, finishing off a braid that hung right over my nose. “I like your hair this color.”

I scrutinized myself in the mirror. I didn’t look like a cool punk chick, in spite of my best intentions. I looked more like Grover the Muppet.

“Amelia? Are Mom and Dad going to get a divorce?”

I met your gaze in the mirror. “I don’t know, Wills.”

I was already anticipating the next question: “Amelia?” you asked. “Is it my fault?”

“No,” I said fiercely. “Honest.” I pulled the barrettes and scrunchies out of my hair and started unraveling the knots. “Okay, enough. I’m not beauty queen material. Go to bed.”

Everyone had forgotten to tuck you in tonight—not that I was expecting any better, with the pathetic level of parenting skills I was witnessing these days. You crawled into your bed from the open end—it still had bars on either side of the mattress, which you hated, because you said they were for babies even if they did keep you safe. I leaned down and tucked you in. Awkwardly, I even kissed your forehead. “’Night,” I said, and I jumped under my own covers and turned off the light.

Sometimes, in the dark, the house felt like it had a heartbeat. I could hear it pulsing, waa waa waa, in my ears. It was even louder now. Maybe my new hair was some kind of superconductor. “You know how Mom always says that I can be anything when I grow up?” you whispered. “That’s a lie.”

I came up on one elbow. “Why?”

“I couldn’t be a boy,” you said.

I smirked. “Ask Mom about that sometime.”

“And I couldn’t be Miss America.”

“How come?”

“You can’t wear leg braces in a pageant,” you said.

I thought about those pageants, girls too beautiful to be real, tall and thin and plastic-perfect. And then I thought of you, short and stubby and twisted, like a root growing wrong from the trunk of a tree, with a banner draped across your chest.

MISS UNDERSTOOD.

MISS INFORMED.

MISS TAKE.

That made my stomach hurt. “Go to sleep already,” I said, more harshly than I meant to, and I counted to 1036 before you started snoring.

Downstairs, I tiptoed into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. There was absolutely no food in this house. I would probably have to eat ramen for breakfast. It was getting to the point, honestly, where if my parents didn’t go to the grocery store, they could be called to task for child abuse.

Been there, done that.

I rummaged through the fruit drawer and unearthed a fossilized lemon and a knob of ginger.

I slammed the refrigerator door shut and heard a moan.

Terrified—did people who broke into houses rape girls with blue hair?—I crept toward the kitchen doorway and looked into the living room. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness again, I saw it: the quilt draped across the back of the couch, the pillow my father had pulled over his head when he rolled over.

I felt the same pang in my stomach that I had felt when you were talking about beauty queens. Moving back through the kitchen as silent as snow, I trailed my fingers along the countertop until they closed over the hilt of a carving knife. I carried it upstairs with me into the bathroom.

The first cut stung. I watched the blood rise like a tide and spill down into my elbow. Shit, what had I done? I ran the cold water, held my forearm underneath it until the blood slowed.

Then I made another parallel cut.

They weren’t on my wrists, don’t think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly why I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period. I could feel everything building up inside of me like steam heat, and I was just turning a valve. It made me think of my mother, when she made her pie crusts. She’d prick little holes all over the place. So it can breathe, she said.

I was just breathing.

I closed my eyes, anticipating each thin cut, feeling that wash of relief when it was done. God, it felt so good—that buildup, and the sweet release. I would have to hide these marks, because I would rather die than let anyone know I’d done this. But I was also proud of myself, a little bit. Crazy girls did this—the ones who wrote poetry about their organs being filled with tar and who wore so much black eyeliner they looked Egyptian—not good girls from good families. That meant either I was not a good girl or I did not come from a good family.

Take your pick.

I opened the tank of the toilet and stuck the knife inside. Maybe I would need it again.

I stared at the cuts, which were pulsing now, just like the rest of the house, waa waa waa. They looked like the ties of railroad tracks. Like a tower of stairs you’d find on a stage. I pictured a parade of ugly people like me, we beauty queens who could not walk without braces. I closed my eyes, and I imagined where those steps would lead.