Hardball: one of the stages of sugar syrup in the preparation of candy, which occurs at 250 to 266 degrees Fahrenheit.

Nougat, marshmallows, rock candy, gummies—these are all cooked to the hardball stage, when the sugar concentration is very high and syrup will form thick ropes when dripped from a spoon. (Be careful. Sugar burns long after it comes into contact with your skin; it’s easy to forget that something so sweet can leave a scar.) To test your solution, drop a bit of it into cold water. It’s ready if it forms a hard ball that doesn’t flatten when fished out but whose shape can still be changed with significant pressure.

Which, of course, leads to the more colloquial definition of hardball: ruthless, aggressive, competitive behavior; the kind that’s designed to mold someone else’s thinking to match your own.

DIVINITY

2½ cups sugar

½ cup light corn syrup

½ cup water

Pinch of salt

3 large egg whites

1 teaspoon vanilla

½ cup chopped pecans

½ cup dried cherries, blueberries, or cranberries

I’ve always found it interesting that a candy with a name such as Divinity requires so much brutality to create.

In a 2-quart saucepan, mix the sugar, corn syrup, water, and salt. Using a candy thermometer, heat to the hardball stage, stirring only until the sugar is dissolved. Meanwhile, beat the egg whites to stiff peaks. When the syrup reaches 260 degrees F, add it gradually to the egg whites while beating at high speed in a mixer. Continue to beat until the candy takes shape—about 5 minutes. Stir in the vanilla, nuts, and dried fruit. Quickly drop the candy from a teaspoon onto waxed paper, finishing each piece with a swirl, and let it cool to room temperature.

Hardball, beating, beating again. Maybe this candy should have been called Submission.

Charlotte

January 2008

It had started as a stain in the outline of a stingray on the ceiling in the dining room—a watermark, an indication that there was something wrong with the pipes in the upstairs bathroom. But the watermark spread, until it no longer looked like a stingray but a whole tide, and half the ceiling seemed to have been steeped in tea leaves. The plumber fussed around under the sinks and beneath the front panel of the tub for about an hour before he reappeared in the kitchen, where I was boiling down spaghetti sauce. “Acid,” he announced.

“No…just marinara.”

“In the pipes,” he said. “I don’t know what you’ve been flushing down there, but it’s eroding them.”

“The only stuff we’ve been flushing is what everyone else flushes. It’s not like the girls are doing chemistry experiments in the shower.”

The plumber shrugged. “I can replace the pipes, but unless you fix the problem, it’s just going to happen again.”

It was costing me $350 just for this visit, by my calculation—we couldn’t afford it, much less a second visit. “Fine.”

It would be another thirty dollars for paint to cover the ceiling, and that was if we did it ourselves. And yet here we were eating pasta for the third time this week, because it was cheaper than meat, because you had needed new shoes, because we were effectively broke.

It was nearly six o’clock—the time Sean usually walked through the door. It had been almost three months since his disastrous deposition, not that you would have known it had ever happened, from our conversations. We talked about what the police chief had said to a local newspaper about an act of vandalism at the high school, about whether Sean should take the detectives’ exam. We talked about Amelia, who had yesterday gone on a word strike and insisted on pantomiming. We talked about how you had walked all the way around the block today without me having to run back and get your chair because your legs were giving out.

We did not talk about this lawsuit.

I had grown up in a family where, if you didn’t discuss a crisis, it didn’t exist. My mother had breast cancer for months before I realized it, and by then it was too late. My father lost three jobs during my childhood, but it wasn’t a topic of conversation—one day he’d just put on a suit again and head to a new office, as if there had been no interruption in the routine. The only place we were supposed to turn with our fears and worries was the confessional; the only comfort we needed was from God.

I had sworn that, when I had my own family, all the cards would be on the table. We wouldn’t have hidden agendas and secrets and rose-colored glasses that kept us from seeing all the knots and snarls of an ordinary family’s affairs. I had forgotten one critical element, though: people who didn’t talk about their problems got to pretend they didn’t have any. People who discussed what was wrong, on the other hand, fought and ached and felt miserable.

“Girls,” I shouted. “Dinner!”

I heard the distant thunder of both your feet moving down the hallway upstairs. You were tentative—one foot on a step joined by another—whereas Amelia nearly skidded into the kitchen. “Oh, God,” she moaned. “Spaghetti again?”

To be fair, it wasn’t like I’d just opened a box of Prince. I’d made the dough, rolled it, cut it into strands. “No, this time it’s fettuccine,” I said, unfazed. “You can set the table.”

Amelia stuck her head in the fridge. “News flash, we don’t have any juice.”

“We’re drinking water this week. It’s better for us.”

“And conveniently cheaper. Tell you what. Take twenty bucks out of my college fund and splurge on chicken cutlets.”

“Hmm, what is that sound?” I said, looking around with my brow furrowed. “Oh, right. The sound of me not laughing.”

At that, Amelia cracked a smile. “Tomorrow, we’d better get some protein.”

“Remind me to buy a little tofu.”

“Gross.” She set a stack of dishes on the table. “Remind me to kill myself before dinner then.”

You came into the kitchen and scooted into your high chair. We didn’t call it a high chair—you were nearly six, and you were quick to point out that you were a big girl—but you couldn’t reach the table without some sort of booster; you were just too tiny. “To cook a billion pounds of pasta, you’d need enough water to fill up seventy-five thousand swimming pools,” you said.

Amelia slouched into the chair beside you. “To eat a billion pounds of pasta, you only have to be born into the O’Keefe family.”

“Maybe if you all keep complaining, I’ll make something gourmet tomorrow night…like squid. Or haggis. Or calves’ brains. That’s protein, Amelia—”

“A long time ago there was this guy, Sawney Beane, in Scotland, who ate people,” you said. “Like, a thousand of them.”

“Well, luckily, we’re not that desperate.”

“But if we were,” you said, your eyes lighting up, “I’d be boneless.”

“Okay, enough.” I dumped a serving of steaming pasta on your plate. “Bon appétit.”

I glanced up at the clock; it was 6:10. “What about Dad?” Amelia said, reading my thoughts.

“We’ll wait for him. I’m sure he’ll be here any minute.”

But five minutes later, Sean had not arrived. You were fidgeting in your seat, and Amelia was picking at the congealed mass of pasta on her plate. “The only thing more disgusting than pasta is ice-cold pasta,” she muttered.

“Eat,” I said, and you and your sister dove into your dinners like hawks.

I stared down at my meal, not hungry anymore. After a few minutes, you girls carried your plates to the sink. The plumber came back downstairs to say he was finished and left me a bill on the kitchen counter. The phone rang twice and was picked up by one of you.

At seven thirty, I called Sean’s cell, and it immediately rolled over into the voice mail.

At eight, I scraped the cold contents of my plate into the trash.

At eight thirty, I tucked you into bed.

At eight forty-five, I called the nonemergency line for dispatch. “This is Charlotte O’Keefe,” I said. “Do you know if Sean took on another shift tonight?”

“He left around five forty-five,” the dispatcher said.

“Oh, right, of course,” I replied lightly, as if I’d known that all along, because I didn’t want her to think I was the kind of wife who had no idea where her husband might be.

At 11:06, I was sitting in the dark on a couch in the family room, wondering if it could still arguably be called a family room if one’s family was splintering apart, when the front door of the house opened gingerly. Sean tiptoed into the hallway, and I switched on the lamp beside me. “Wow,” I said. “Traffic must have been a bitch.”

He froze. “You’re up.”

“We waited for you for dinner. Your plate’s still on the table, if you’re in the mood for fossilized fettuccine.”

“I went to O’Boys after my shift with some of the guys. I was going to call…”

I finished his sentence for him. “But you didn’t want to talk to me.”

He came closer, then, so that I could smell his aftershave. Licorice, and the faintest bit of smoke. You could blindfold me and I would be able to pick Sean out from a crowd with my other senses. But identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through—the man you fell in love with years ago might look the same and speak the same and smell the same yet be completely different.

I supposed Sean could say that about me, too.

He sat down on a chair across from me. “What do you want me to tell you, Charlotte? You want me to lie and say I look forward to coming home at night?”

“No.” I swallowed. “I want…I just want things to go back to the way they were.”

“Then stop,” he said quietly. “Just walk away from what you’ve started.”

Choices are funny things—ask a native tribe that’s eaten grubs and roots forever if they’re unhappy, and they’ll shrug. But give them filet mignon and truffle sauce and then ask them to go back to living off the land, and they will always be thinking of that gourmet meal. If you don’t know there’s an alternative, you can’t miss it. Marin Gates had offered me a brass ring that I never, in my wildest dreams, would have considered—but now that she had, how could I not try to grab it? With every future break, with every dollar we moved further into debt, I would be thinking about how I should have reached out.

Sean shook his head. “That’s what I thought.”

“I’m thinking of Willow’s future…”

“Well, I’m thinking about here and now. She doesn’t give a shit about money. She cares about whether her parents love her. But that’s not the message she’s going to hear when you get up in that damn courtroom.”

“Then you tell me, Sean, what’s the answer? Are we just supposed to sit around and hope Willow stops breaking? Or that you—” I broke off abruptly.

“That I what? Get a better job? Win the fucking lottery? Why don’t you just say it, Charlotte? You think I can’t support all of you.”

“I never said that—”

“You didn’t have to. It came through loud and clear,” he said. “You know, you used to say that you felt like I’d rescued you and Amelia. But I guess in the long run, I let you down.”

“This isn’t about you. It’s about our family.”

“Which you’re ripping apart. My God, Charlotte, what do you think people see when they look at you now?”

“A mother,” I said.

“A martyr,” Sean corrected. “No one’s ever as good as you when it comes to taking care of Willow. You don’t trust anyone else to get it right. Don’t you see how fucked up that is?”

I felt a tightening at the back of my throat. “Well, excuse me for not being perfect.”

“No,” Sean said. “You just expect that of the rest of us.” With a sigh, he walked to the fireplace hearth, where a pillow and a quilt were neatly stacked. “If you don’t mind, you’re sitting on my bed.”

I managed to hold in my sob until I was upstairs. I lay down on Sean’s side of the mattress, trying to find the spot where he used to sleep. I turned my face in to the pillow, which still smelled of his shampoo. Although I had changed the sheets since he’d moved to the couch, I hadn’t washed his pillowcase, on purpose—and now I wondered why. So I could pretend he was still here? So that I’d have something of him if he never came back?

On our wedding day, Sean told me that he’d step in front of a bullet to save me. I knew he’d wanted me to confess the same thing, but I couldn’t. Amelia needed me to take care of her. On the other hand, if that bullet had been heading straight for Amelia, I wouldn’t have thought twice before diving forward.

Did that make me a very good mother, or a very bad wife?

But this wasn’t a bullet, and it hadn’t been fired at us. It was an on-coming train, and the cost of saving my daughter was throwing myself onto the tracks. There was only one catch: my best friend was tied to me.

It was one thing to sacrifice your own life for someone else’s. It was another thing entirely to bring into the mix a third party—a third party who knew you, who trusted you implicitly.

It had seemed so simple: a lawsuit that acknowledged how hard it was for us, and that would make things so much better. But in my haste to see the silver lining, I missed the storm clouds: the fact that accusing Piper and convincing Sean would sever those relationships. And now, it was too late. Even if I called Marin and told her to stop everything, it wouldn’t make Piper forgive me. It wouldn’t keep Sean from judging me.

You can tell yourself that you would be willing to lose everything you have in order to get something you want. But it’s a catch-22: all of those things you’re willing to lose are what make you recognizable. Lose them, and you’ve lost yourself.

For a moment I imagined tiptoeing down the stairs and kneeling in front of Sean and telling him I was sorry. I imagined asking him to start over. Then I looked up to find that the door had opened a crack, and your little white triangle of a face was poking through. “Mommy,” you said, coming closer with your awkward gait and climbing onto the bed, “did you have a nightmare?”

Your body tucked into mine, back to front. “Yeah, Wills. I did.”

“Do you need me to stay here with you?”

I wrapped my arms around you, a parenthesis. “Forever,” I said.

Christmas had been too warm this year, green instead of white, Mother Nature’s confirmation that life wasn’t as it should have been. After two weeks of temperatures in the forties, winter returned with a vengeance. That night, snow fell. We woke up with our throats dry and the heat humming from the radiators. Outside, the air smelled of chimney smoke.

Sean was already gone by the time I came downstairs at seven. He’d left behind a neatly folded stack of bedding in the laundry room and an empty coffee mug in the sink. You came downstairs rubbing your eyes. “My feet are cold,” you said.

“Then put on slippers. Where’s Amelia?”

“Still asleep.”

It was Saturday; there was no reason to wake her up early. I watched you rubbing your hip, probably not even aware of what you were doing. You needed exercise to strengthen the muscles around your pelvis, although it still hurt you to do it after your femur fractures. “Tell you what. If you go get the paper, we can make waffles for breakfast.”

I watched your mind work through the calculations—the mailbox was a quarter of a mile down the driveway; it was freezing out. “With ice cream?”

“Strawberries,” I bargained.

“Okay.”

You went into the mudroom to pull your coat over your pajamas, and I helped you strap on your braces before stuffing your feet into low boots that could accommodate them. “Be careful on the driveway.” You zipped up your jacket. “Willow? Did you hear me?”

“Yes, be careful,” you parroted, and you opened up the front door and headed outside.

I stood at the doorway and watched for a few moments, until you turned around on the driveway, planted your hands on your hips, and said, “I’m not going to fall! Stop watching!”

So I stepped back and closed the door—but through the window, I tracked you for a few more moments anyway. In the kitchen, I began to pull ingredients from the fridge and I plugged in the waffle iron. I took out the plastic batter bowl you liked so much, because it was light enough for you to lift and pour.

I headed to the front porch again, to wait for you. But when I stepped outside, you were gone. I had a clear view from the driveway to the mailbox, and you were nowhere in it. Frantic, I stuffed my feet into a pair of boots and ran down the driveway. About halfway, I saw footsteps pressed into the snow that still blanketed the stiff grass, heading toward the skating pond.

“Willow!” I yelled. “Willow!”

Goddamn Sean, for not backing a load of fill into the pond like I’d asked him to.

Suddenly, there you were, at the edge of the reeds that fringed the thin ice.

You had one foot balanced on the surface. “Willow,” I said softly, so that I didn’t startle you, but when you turned around, your boot slipped and you pitched forward with your hands outstretched to break your fall.

I had seen it coming. I had seen it, and so I was already moving as you turned to face me. I stepped onto ice, which was still too new and thin to support any weight, and felt the lettuce edge shatter underneath my foot. My boot filled with frigid water, but I was able to wrap my arms around you, to keep you from falling.

I was soaked to midthigh, and your body was slung over my forearm like a sack of cake flour, the breath knocked out of you. I staggered backward, pulling my foot from the muck and the weeds that lined the bottom of the pond, and sat down hard to cushion your fall. “Are you all right?” I gasped. “Is anything broken?”

You did a quick internal assessment and shook your head.

“What were you thinking? You know better—”

“Amelia gets to walk on the ice,” you said, your voice small.

“First, you’re not Amelia. And second, this ice isn’t strong enough.”

You twisted around. “Like me.”

I turned you gently, so that you were sitting on my lap, with your legs on either side of mine. A spider, that’s what kids called it when they did it on swing sets, although you’d never been allowed. Too easily, a leg could snag on a chain, or get twisted with a friend’s limbs.

“It’s not like you,” I said firmly. “Willow, you are the strongest person I know.”

“But you still wish I didn’t have to use a wheelchair. Or go to the hospital all the time.”

Sean had insisted that you were well aware of what was going on around you; I had naïvely assumed that, after the talk we’d had months ago, if you did have doubts about my words, they’d be assuaged by my actions. But I had been worried about the things you’d hear me say—not the messages you might still read between the lines. “Remember how I told you that I’d have to say things that I don’t mean? That’s all it is, Willow.” I hesitated. “Imagine you’re at school and your friend asks you if you like her sneakers, and you don’t—you think they’re incredibly ugly. You wouldn’t tell her you hate them, would you? Because it would make her sad.”

“That’s lying.”

“I know. And it’s wrong, most of the time, unless you’re trying not to hurt someone’s feelings.”

You stared at me. “But you’re hurting my feelings.”

The knife in my stomach twisted. “I don’t mean to.”

“So,” you said, thinking hard, “it’s like when Amelia plays Opposite Day?”

Amelia had invented that when she was about your age. Confrontational even then, she’d refuse to do her homework and then burst out laughing when we yelled at her, saying it was Opposite Day and she’d already finished it all. Or she’d terrorize you, calling you Glass Ass, and when you came to us in tears, Amelia would insist that on Opposite Day, this meant you were a princess. I’d never been able to tell if Amelia had invented Opposite Day because she was imaginative or because she was subversive.

But maybe this was a way to unravel the tangled thicket that was wrongful birth, to spin a lie, like Rumpelstiltskin, into something golden. “Exactly,” I said. “Just like Opposite Day.”

You smiled at me so sweetly that I could feel the frost melting around us. “Okay then,” you said. “I wish you’d never been born, too.”

When Sean and I were first dating, I would leave treats in his mailbox. Sugar cookies cut in the shapes of his initials, a roll of babka, sticky buns with candied pecans, almond roca. I took literally the term sweet heart. I imagined him reaching in for his bills and catalogs and coming up instead with a jelly roll, a honey cake, a building block of fudge. “Will you still love me when I put on thirty pounds?” Sean would ask, and I’d laugh at him. “What makes you think I love you?” I’d say.

I did, of course. But it was always easier for me to show love than to say it. The word reminded me of pralines: small, precious, almost unbearably sweet. I would light up in his presence; I felt like a sun in the constellation of his embrace. But trying to put what I felt for him into words diminished it somehow, like pinning a butterfly under glass, or videotaping a comet. Each night he’d wrap his arms around me and tip into my ear that sentence, bubbles that burst on contact: I love you. And then he’d wait. He’d wait, and even though I knew he did not want to pressure me before I was ready to make my confession, I would feel in that silence his disappointment.

One day, when I came out of work still dusting flour off my hands so that I could rush to pick up Amelia from school, I found a small index card wedged under my windshield wiper. I LOVE YOU, it read.

I tucked it into my glove compartment, and that afternoon, I made truffles and left them in Sean’s mailbox.

The next day, when I left work, there was an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch piece of paper taped on my windshield: I LOVE YOU.

I called Sean. “I’m going to win,” I said.

“I think we both are,” he replied.

I’d baked a lavender panna cotta and left it on top of his MasterCard bill.

He countered with poster board. You could read the message all the way from the front window of the restaurant, which made me the object of plenty of ribbing from the maître d’ and the head chef.

“What’s your problem?” Piper said to me. “Just tell him how you feel, already.” But Piper didn’t understand, and I couldn’t explain to her. When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation. Those three words were what everyone used; simple syllables couldn’t contain something as rare as what I felt for Sean. I wanted him to feel what I felt when I was with him: that incredible combination of comfort, decadence, and wonder; the knowledge that, with just a single taste of him, I was addicted. So I cooked tiramisu and left it wedged between a package from Amazon.com and a flyer for a painting company.

This time, Sean phoned me. “Opening someone else’s mailbox is a felony, you know,” he said.

“So arrest me,” I answered.

That day, I left work—trailed by the rest of the staff, who had come to view our courtship as a spectator sport—and found my car completely wrapped in butcher paper. Painted in letters as tall as me was Sean’s message: I’M ON A DIET.

Sure enough, I baked him poppy scones, and they were still in the mailbox the next day when I went to leave off ginger cookies. And the next day, with those two items untouched, I couldn’t even fit the strawberry tart. I carried it up to his house instead, and rang the doorbell. His blond hair was backlit; his white tee stretched across his chest. “How come you’re not eating what I made for you?” I asked.

He gave me a lazy smile. “How come you won’t say it back?”

“Can’t you tell?”

Sean crossed his arms. “Tell what?”

“That I love you?”

He opened the screen door, grabbed me, and kissed me hard. “It’s about time,” he said, with a grin. “I’m freaking starving.”

You and I didn’t just cook waffles that morning. We made cinnamon bread and oatmeal cookies and blondies. I let you lick the spoon, the spatula, the bowl. Around eleven, Amelia loped into the kitchen, freshly showered. “What army’s coming for lunch?” she asked, but then she took a corn muffin, broke it open, and breathed in the steam. “Can I help?”

We made a raspberry velvet cake and a plum tarte Tatin, apple turnovers and pinwheel cookies and macaroons. We baked until there was hardly anything left in my pantry, until I had forgotten what you’d said to me at the pond, until we had run out of brown sugar, until we did not notice your father being gone the whole day, until we could not eat another bite.

“Now what?” Amelia asked, when every inch of counter space was covered with something we’d made.

It had been so long that, once I started, I hadn’t been able to stop. And I suppose a part of me still functioned cooking for a restaurant crowd and not an individual family—much less one that was absent one member. “We could give it to our neighbors,” you suggested.

“No way,” Amelia said. “Let them buy it.”

“We’re not running a bakery,” I pointed out.

“Why not? It could be like a vegetable stand, at the end of the driveway. Willow and me, we can make a big sign that says Sweets by Charlotte, and you can wrap everything in Saran Wrap…”

“We could cover up a shoe box,” you said, “and put a slit in the top for the money, and charge ten dollars each.”

“Ten dollars?” Amelia said. “Try a buck, peabrain.”

“Mom! She called me peabrain…”

I was imagining whitewashed walls, a glass display case, wrought-iron tables with marble tops. I was picturing rows of pistachio muffins in an industrial stove, meringues that melted in your mouth, the angel-wing ring of the cash register. “Syllabub,” I interrupted, and both you girls turned to me. “That’s what the name on the sign should be.”

That night, by the time Sean came home, I was fast asleep, and he was gone by the time I woke up, too. The only way I even knew he’d stopped in was a used mug sitting lonely in the bowl of the sink.

My stomach knotted; I pretended it was hunger, not regret. In the kitchen I made a piece of toast and took out a crisp white coffee filter for the machine.

When Sean and I were first married, he would make coffee for me every morning. He didn’t drink coffee himself, but he was up early for his shift and would program the Krups machine so that a fresh pot would be waiting by the time I got out of the shower. I would come downstairs to find a mug waiting, with two spoonfuls of sugar already inside. Sometimes, it would be sitting on a note: SEE YOU LATER or I MISS YOU ALREADY.

This morning the kitchen was cold, the coffeemaker silent and empty.

I measured out the water and the coffee grounds, pushed a button so that the liquid would stream into the carafe. I reached for a mug in the cabinet and then, on second thought, took the one Sean had used out of the sink. I rinsed it clean and poured myself a cup of coffee. It tasted too strong, bitter. I wondered if Sean’s lips had touched the mug in the same place as mine.

I had always been suspicious of women who described the dissolution of their marriages as something that happened overnight. How could you not know? I’d thought. How could you miss all those signs? Well, let me tell you how: you were so busy putting out a fire directly in front of you that you were completely oblivious to the inferno raging at your back. I could not remember the last time Sean and I had laughed about something together. I could not remember the last time I’d gone and kissed him, just because. I had been so focused on protecting you that I’d left myself completely vulnerable.

Sometimes you and Amelia played board games, and when you rolled the dice, they got stuck in a crease of the couch or rolled onto the floor. Do-over, you’d say, and it was that easy to get a second chance. That’s what I wanted now: a do-over. Except, if I was being honest with myself, I wouldn’t know where to start.

I dumped the coffee into the sink and watched it swirl down the drain.

I didn’t need caffeine. And I didn’t need someone to make me coffee in the morning, either. Leaving the kitchen, I grabbed a jacket (Sean’s, it smelled like him) and headed outside to get the newspaper.

The green box that held the local paper was empty; Sean must have taken it on the way out to wherever he’d gone. Frustrated, I turned and noticed the wheelbarrow full of baked goods that we had set out yesterday at the end of the driveway.

The wheelbarrow was empty, except for the shoe box Amelia had fashioned into an honor-system cash register, and the cardboard sign you’d painted with glitter to read SYLLABUB.

I grabbed the shoe box and ran back to the house, into your bedroom. “Girls,” I said, “look!”

You both rolled over, still cocooned in sleep. “God,” Amelia groaned, glancing at the clock.

I sat down on your bed and opened the shoe box. “Where did you get all the money?” you asked, and that was enough to make Amelia sit up in bed.

“What money?” she asked.

“From the stuff we baked,” I said.

“Give me that.” Amelia grabbed the box and started organizing the money into piles. There were bills and coins, in all denominations. “There’s like a hundred dollars here!”

You crawled out of your bed and onto Amelia’s. “We’re rich,” you said, and you took a fistful of dollars and tossed them overhead.

“What are we going to do with it?” Amelia asked.

“I think we should buy a monkey,” you said.

“Monkeys cost way more than a hundred dollars,” Amelia scoffed. “I think we should get a TV for our bedroom.”

And I thought we should pay down the debt on our MasterCard, but I doubted you girls would agree.

“We already have a TV downstairs,” you said.

“Well, we don’t need a stupid monkey!”

“Girls,” I interrupted. “There’s only one way to get what we all want. We bake enough to make more money.” I looked at each of you in turn. “Well? What are you waiting for?”

You and Amelia rushed to the adjacent bathroom, and then I heard running water and the methodic scrub of your toothbrushes. I pulled up the sheets on your bed and tucked in the blankets. On Amelia’s bed, I did the same thing, but this time when I smoothed the quilt under the mattress, my fingers swept free dozens of candy wrappers, the plastic bag from a loaf of bread, crumbling packets of graham crackers. Teenagers, I thought, sweeping them all into the trash can.

In the bathroom, I could hear you two arguing about who had left the cap off the toothpaste. I reached into the shoe box and tossed another handful of cash into the air, listening instead to the hail of silver coins, the song of possibility.

Sean

I probably shouldn’t have taken the newspaper. That’s what I thought to myself as I sat in a booth at a diner two towns over from Bankton, nursing my glass of orange juice and waiting for the short-order cook to fry up my eggs. After all, it was the first thing Charlotte did every morning: sip a cup of coffee as she perused the headlines. Sometimes she’d even read the letters to the editor out loud, especially the ones that sounded as if they’d been written by nutcases one step away from a Ruby Ridge standoff. When I sneaked out at six a.m., pausing before I grabbed the paper, I realized that this was going to piss her off. And, okay, maybe that was enough incentive for me to drive off with it. But now that I’d unfolded it and scanned the front page, I categorically knew I should have left it where it was, in its box.

Because right there, above the fold, was a story about me and my family.

LOCAL COP FILES WRONGFUL BIRTH SUIT

Willow O’Keefe is—in many ways—a normal five-year-old girl. She goes to full-day kindergarten at Bankton Elementary School, where she studies reading and math and music. She plays with her peers during recess. She buys lunch in the school cafeteria. But in one respect, Willow is not like other five-year-olds. Sometimes Willow uses a wheelchair, sometimes a walker, and sometimes, leg braces. That’s because, during the course of her short life, she’s suffered over sixty-two broken bones, due to a disease called osteogenesis imperfecta, a condition that Willow’s had since birth and that—her parents allege—should have been diagnosed by the obstetrician early enough to allow for an abortion. Although the O’Keefes love their daughter dearly, her medical bills have spiraled past routine insurance coverage, and now her parents—Lieutenant Sean O’Keefe of the Bankton Police Department and Charlotte O’Keefe—are among a growing number of patients suing their obstetrician-gynecologists for not providing them with information about fetal abnormalities that, they say, would have led them to terminate the pregnancies.

More than half of the states in America recognize wrongful birth lawsuits, and many of these cases settle out of court for less money than a jury might award because medical malpractice insurance companies don’t want a child like Willow presented to a jury. But lawsuits like this often open a can of worms in terms of ethical complications: what do such lawsuits suggest about the value society places on disabled people? Who can judge parents, who see their disabled children suffering daily? Who—if anyone—has the right to choose what sorts of disabilities should determine abortion? And what is the effect on a child like Willow, who is old enough to hear her parents’ testimony?

Lou St. Pierre, the president of the New Hampshire chapter of the American Association of People with Disabilities, says he understands why parents like the O’Keefes choose to file a lawsuit. “It can help with the incredible financial burden that a severely disabled child puts on a family,” says St. Pierre, who was born with spina bifida and is wheelchair-bound. “But the caveat is the message that’s being sent to that child: that disabled people can’t live rich, full lives; that if you aren’t perfect, you shouldn’t be here.”

Most recently, in 2006, a $3.2 million settlement in a 2004 wrongful birth case was overturned by the New Hampshire Supreme Court.

There was even a picture of the four of us—one that had been taken for a Meet Your Friendly Neighborhood Cop circular put out by the Bankton PD two years ago. Amelia didn’t have her braces yet.

Your arm was in a cast.

I threw the paper across the booth so that it landed in the far seat. Fucking journalists. What did they do, wait at the courthouse to see what was coming up on the docket? Anyone who read this article—and who wouldn’t? It was the local paper—would think I was in this for the cash.

I wasn’t, and just to prove it, I took out my wallet and left twenty bucks on the table for a two-dollar meal I hadn’t even been served.

Fifteen minutes later, after a quick stop at the precinct to look up Marin Gates’s address, I showed up at her house. It wasn’t at all what I was expecting. There were gnome garden statues, and the mailbox was a pig whose snout opened. The clapboards were painted purple. It looked like the kind of place Hansel and Gretel would live, not a no-nonsense attorney.

When I rang the bell, Marin answered the door. She was wearing a Beatles Revolver T-shirt and sweatpants that said UNH down the leg. “What are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“You should have called.” She looked around, trying to find Charlotte.

“I’m here alone,” I said.

Marin folded her arms across her chest. “I’m unlisted. How did you find out where I live?”

I shrugged. “I’m a cop.”

“That’s an invasion of privacy—”

“Good. You can sue me when you finish suing Piper Reece.” I held up the morning paper. “Did you read this crap?”

“Yes. There’s very little we can do about the press, except keep saying ‘No comment.’”

“I’m out,” I said.

“Sorry?”

“I quit. I want out of this lawsuit.” Simply saying those words made me feel like I’d passed the weight of the world to some other sucker. “I’ll sign anything you want me to, I just want to make it official.”

Marin hesitated. “Come inside so we can talk,” she said.

If I’d been surprised by the outside of her house, I was stunned by the interior. There was one entire wall covered with Hummel figurines on shelves, and the other walls were spotted with needlepoint. Doilies bloomed like algae on the surface of the sofa. “Nice place,” I lied.

She just stared at me, impassive. “I rent it fully furnished,” she explained. “The woman who owns the house lives in Fort Lauderdale.”

On the dining room table was a stack of files, and a legal pad. All around the floor were crumpled pieces of paper; whatever it was she was writing wasn’t coming smoothly.

“Look, Lieutenant O’Keefe, I know you and I haven’t gotten off to the best start, and I know the deposition was…challenging for you. But we’ll take another stab at that, and things are going to be different once we’re in court. I really do feel confident that the damages the jury will be willing to award—”

“I don’t want your blood money,” I said. “She can have it all.”

“I think I see the problem here,” Marin answered. “But this isn’t about you and your wife. This is about Willow. And if you really want to give her the kind of life she deserves, you need to win a lawsuit like this. If you pull out now, it just gives the defense one more hook to hang their hat on—”

Too late, she realized that this might actually be something I’d want.

“My daughter,” I said tightly, “reads at a sixth-grade level. She’s going to see that newspaper article, and a dozen others like it, I’m guessing. She’s going to hear her mother tell the whole wide world she wasn’t wanted. You tell me, Ms. Gates. Is it better that I sit in that courtroom actively undermining your chance of winning your case or that I step aside so there’s somewhere for Willow to turn when she needs to know that someone loves her, no matter what she’s like?”

“Are you so sure you’ll be doing the right thing for your daughter?”

“Are you?” I asked. “I’m not leaving here until you give me paperwork to sign.”

“You can’t expect me to draft something on a Sunday morning when I’m not at the office—”

“Twenty minutes. I’ll meet you there.” I had just opened the door to walk outside when I was stopped by Marin’s voice.

“Your wife,” she asked. “What does she think about you doing this?”

I turned slowly. “She doesn’t think about me,” I said.

I didn’t see Charlotte that night, or the next morning. I assumed it would take that long for Marin to tell my wife that I’d dropped out of the lawsuit. However, even a guy who’s strong in his convictions understands self-preservation; there was no way I was headed home to talk to your mother until I had a few fortifying drinks under my belt—and, being a cop, had left enough time to let the alcohol pass safely through my system before I drove.

Maybe then I’d be lucky enough to find her asleep.

“Tommy,” I said, motioning to the bartender, and I pushed my empty beer glass toward him. I had come to O’Boys with some of the patrol officers after our shift, but they’d all left to go home to their wives and kids for supper by now. It was too late for a predinner drink and too early for the nighttime party crowd; other than Tommy and me, the only person in the bar was an old man who started drinking at three and stopped when his daughter came to pick him up at last call.

The bell over the door jingled, and a woman walked in. She peeled off a tight leopard-print coat only to reveal an even tighter hot pink dress. It was outfits like this that always fucked up rape cases for the prosecution.

“Cold out there,” she said, sliding onto a stool beside me. I stared resolutely down at my empty beer glass. Try wearing some clothes, I thought.

Tommy passed me a fresh beer and turned to the woman. “What can I get you?”

“A dirty martini,” she said, and then she turned to me and smiled. “You ever have one of those?”

I took a sip of beer. “I don’t like olives.”

“I like to suck the pimientos out,” she admitted. She unclipped her hair—blond, curly—so that it fell like a river to the middle of her back. “Beer tastes like Kitty Litter, if you ask me.”

I laughed at that. “When was the last time you tasted Kitty Litter?”

She arched her brows. “Haven’t you ever just looked at something and known how it’s going to taste?”

She did say something, didn’t she? Not someone?

I’ve never cheated on Charlotte. I’ve never even thought about cheating on Charlotte. God knows, I come across enough young women in my career to have the opportunity, if I wanted to take advantage. To be honest, Charlotte was all I’d ever wanted—even after eight years. But the woman I’d married—the one who had promised to buy vanilla ice cream for me in her wedding vows, even though it was a poor substitute for chocolate—was not the same one I saw these days in our house. That woman was single-minded and distant, so focused on what she might get that she couldn’t even see what she had.

“My name’s Sean,” I said, facing the woman.

“Taffy Lloyd,” she said, and she took a sip of her martini. “Like the candy. The Taffy part, not the Lloyd.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t I know you?”

“I’m pretty sure I’d remember meeting you before—”

“No, I know it. I never forget a face—” She broke off, snapping her fingers. “You were in the newspaper,” she said. “You’ve got a little girl who’s really sick, right? How’s she doing?”

I lifted my beer, wondering if she could hear my heart pounding as loud as I could. She recognized me from that article? If this woman did, how many others would? “She’s doing all right,” I said tersely, finishing my beer in another long swallow. “In fact, I’ve got to get home to her.” The hell with driving; I’d walk.

I started to get up from my stool but was stopped by her voice. “I heard you’re not suing anymore.”

Slowly, I turned. “That wasn’t in the newspaper.”

Suddenly, she didn’t look ditzy at all. Her eyes were a piercing blue, and they were fixed on mine. “Why did you want out?”

Was she a reporter? Was this a trap? I felt my guard rising, too late. “I’m just trying to do what’s best for Willow,” I muttered, shrugging into my jacket, cursing when my sleeve got tangled.

Taffy Lloyd set a business card down on the bar in front of me. “What’s best for Willow,” she said, “is for this lawsuit not to happen.” With a nod, she swung her leopard coat over her shoulder and walked out the door, leaving behind most of her martini.

I picked up the card and traced my finger over the raised black lettering:

Taffy Lloyd, Legal Investigator

Booker, Hood & Coates

I drove. I drove routes I took in my police cruiser, great figure eights that looped closer and closer to the center of Bankton. I watched falling stars and drove where I thought they’d landed. I drove until I could barely keep my eyes open, until it was after midnight.

I let myself into the house on a whisper and, in the dark, fumbled my way into the laundry room to get the sheets and pillowcase for the couch. Suddenly, I was exhausted, so tired I couldn’t even stand. I sank down on the sofa and buried my face in my hands.

What I couldn’t understand was how this had gone so far, so fast. One minute I was storming out of the lawyer’s office; the next, Charlotte had set up another appointment. I couldn’t forbid her to do that—but to be honest, I had never figured she’d carry through with a lawsuit. Charlotte wasn’t the type to take a risk. But that’s where I’d messed up: This wasn’t about Charlotte, in her mind. This was about you.

“Daddy?”

I looked up to find you standing in front of me, your bare feet white as a ghost’s. “What are you doing up?” I said. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“I got thirsty.”

I walked into the kitchen, with you padding along behind me. You were favoring your right leg—although another father might simply have wondered if his daughter was still half asleep, I was thinking of microfractures and hip displacements. I poured you a glass of water from the tap and leaned against the counter as you drank it. “Okay,” I said, hoisting you into my arms, because I couldn’t bear to watch you navigate the stairs. “It’s way past your bedtime.”

Your arms laced around my neck. “Daddy, how come you don’t sleep in your bed anymore?”

I paused, halfway up the steps. “I like the couch. It’s more comfortable.”

I crept into your bedroom, careful not to disturb Amelia, who was softly snoring in the bed beside yours. I tucked you under the covers. “I bet if I wasn’t like this,” you said, “if my bones weren’t all messed up—you’d still be sleeping upstairs.”

In the dark, I could see the shine of your eyes, the apple curve of your cheek. I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer. “Go to sleep,” I said. “It’s too late to talk about this.”

Suddenly, just like that, as if someone had spliced a future frame into a movie, I could see who you would become when you grew up. That stubborn resolve, the quiet acceptance of someone resigned to fighting an uphill battle—well, the person you resembled most at that moment was your mother.

Instead of going downstairs, I slipped into the master bedroom. Charlotte was sleeping on her right side, facing the empty side of the bed. I sat down gingerly on the edge of the mattress, trying not to move it as I stretched out on top of the covers. I rolled onto my side, so that I was mirroring Charlotte.

Being here, in my own bed, with my own wife, felt inevitable and uncomfortable at the same time—like getting to the end of a jigsaw puzzle and forcing the last piece into place, even though the edges don’t match up the way they ought to. I stared at Charlotte’s hand, curled into a fist against the covers, as if she was still ready to come up swinging even when she was unconscious. When I touched the edge of her wrist, her fingers opened like a rose. When I glanced up, I found her staring at me. “Am I dreaming?” she whispered.

“Yes,” I said, and her hand closed around mine.

I watched Charlotte as she drifted back to sleep, trying to pinpoint the divide between when she was here with me and when she was spirited away, but it happened too quickly for me to measure. Gently I slipped my hand from hers. I hoped, for a moment when she woke up, she’d remember that I’d been here. I hoped that it would make up for what I was about to do.

There was a guy in the department whose wife had had breast cancer a few years ago. In solidarity, a bunch of us had shaved our heads when she went through chemo; we all did what we could to support George through his personal hell. And then his wife recovered, and everyone celebrated, and a week later, she told him she wanted a divorce. At the time, I thought it was the most callous thing a woman could possibly do: ditch the guy who’s stood beside you through thick and thin. But now, I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.

I didn’t like being here—it was like having a bad flashback. Reaching out for a napkin underneath a pitcher in the center of the massive polished table, I mopped at my forehead. What I really wanted to do was admit that this was a mistake and run. Jump out the window, maybe.

But before I could act on that sane thought, the door opened. In walked a man with prematurely silver hair—had I not noticed that the first time around?—followed by a blond woman wearing stylish glasses and a suit buttoned nearly to the throat. My jaw dropped; Taffy Lloyd cleaned up remarkably well. I nodded silently at her, and then at Guy Booker—the lawyer who’d made a fool out of me in this very office months ago. “I came to ask you what I can do,” I said.

Booker looked at his investigator. “I’m not sure I understand what that means, Lieutenant O’Keefe…”

“It means,” I said, “I’m on your side now.”

Marin

What do you say to the mother you’ve never met?

Since Maisie had contacted me saying she had a valid address for my birth mother, I had drafted hundreds of letters. That was the way it worked: even though Maisie apparently had located my birth mother, I wasn’t allowed to contact her directly. Instead, I was supposed to write a letter to my mother and mail it to Maisie, who would play middleman. She’d contact my mother and say she had a very important personal matter to discuss and would leave a phone number. Presumably, when my birth mother heard this, she would know what the personal matter was and would call in. Once Maisie verified that the woman was indeed my birth mother, she’d either read aloud or mail the letter I’d written.

Maisie had sent me a list of guidelines, which were supposed to help me write the letter:

This is your introduction to the birth parent for whom you have been searching. This person is virtually a stranger to you, so your letter will serve as a first impression. In order to not overwhelm your birth parent, it is recommended that your letter be no more than two pages. As long as your handwriting is legible, it is more appreciated to receive a handwritten letter, since that gives a sense of your personality to the recipient.

You should decide whether you want this first contact to be nonidentifying. If you want to use your name, please understand this makes it possible for the other party to locate you. You may want to wait until you get to know the other party before releasing your address or phone number.

The letter should contain general information about you—age, education, occupation, talents or hobbies, marital status, and whether or not you have children. Including photographs of yourself and your family is much preferred. You may wish to explain why you are searching for your birth parent at this time.

If your background includes any difficult information, this is not the time to share it. Negative adoption information—such as having been placed with an abusive family—is not appropriate. It’s better to share this information later, once a relationship has developed. Many birth parents report feelings of guilt over the decision to give a child up for adoption and fear that their decision, which was made for your benefit, might not have turned out as well as they’d wished. If negative information is shared at the outset, that information may overshadow all positive aspects of developing a rapport with you in the future.

If you feel grateful to your birth parent for the decision she made, you may briefly share this. If you desire information about family medical history, you may mention this. You may want to consider waiting to ask about the birth father. This may be a painful subject at first.

To reassure the birth parent that you want a mutually beneficial relationship, you may include a statement that you’d like to phone or meet but will respect her need for time to determine her comfort level regarding this.

I had read Maisie’s guidelines so often I could practically recite them verbatim. It seemed to me that the really instructive information was missing. How much do you share to illustrate what you’re really like but not to turn someone off? If I told her I was a Democrat, for instance, and she turned out to be a Republican, would she throw my letter in the trash? Should I mention how I’d marched to raise funds for AIDS research and that I advocated same-sex marriage? And this didn’t even take into account the decision I had to make when it came to putting my letter down in black and white. I wanted to send a card—it felt like I was trying harder, as opposed to just a scribbled missive on a legal pad. But the cards I had spotlighted images as different as Picasso, Mary Engelbreit, and Mapplethorpe. The Picasso seemed too common; the Engelbreit, too Mary Sunshine; but Mapplethorpe—well, what if she hated him on principle? Get over it, Marin, I told myself. There aren’t any naked bodies on the card; it’s a damn flower.

Now all I had to do was come up with the content to go inside.

Briony pushed open the door to my office, and I hastily stuffed my notes into a folder. Maybe it wasn’t entirely PC to use my work time to feed my personal obsession, but the more involved I became with the O’Keefe case, the harder it was to put my birth mother out of my mind. Silly as it sounded, approaching her made me feel like I was saving my soul. If I had to represent a woman who wished she’d gotten rid of her child, then the least I could do was find my own mother and praise her for thinking differently.

The secretary tossed a manila envelope onto my desk. “Delivery from the devil,” she said, and I glanced down to see the return address: Booker, Hood & Coates.

I ripped it open and read the amended list of interrogatories.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I murmured, and stood up to get my coat. It was time to make a house call to Charlotte O’Keefe.

A girl with blue hair answered the door, and I stared at her for a full five seconds before I recognized Charlotte’s older daughter, Amelia. “Whatever you’re selling,” she said, “we don’t need it.”

“Amelia, right?” I forced a smile. “I’m Marin Gates. Your mom’s lawyer.”

She scrutinized me. “Whatever. She’s not here right now. She left me to babysit.”

From inside the house: “I’m not a baby!”

Amelia flicked her eyes toward me again. “What I meant to say is that she left me to invalidsit.”

Suddenly your face poked around the doorframe. “Hi,” you said, and you smiled. You were missing a tooth in front.

I thought: The jury will love you.

Then I hated myself for thinking that.

“Did you want to leave a message?” Amelia asked.

Well, I couldn’t very well tell her that her father had become a defense witness. “I was hoping to talk to your mother in person.”

Amelia shrugged. “We’re not supposed to let in strangers.”

“She’s not a stranger,” you said, and you reached out and pulled me over the threshold.

I didn’t have a lot of experience with kids, and at the rate I was going, I might never, but there was something about your hand in mine, soft as a rabbit’s foot and maybe just as lucky. I let myself be led to the couch in the living room and looked around at the machine-made Oriental rug, the dusty face of the television, the battered cardboard boxes of games stacked high on the fireplace hearth. Monopoly was in full swing from the looks of it; there was a board in play set on the coffee table in front of the couch. “You can take over for me,” Amelia said, her arms folded. “I’m more of a communist than a capitalist anyway.”

She vanished up the stairs, leaving me staring down at the game board. “Did you know which street gets landed on the most?” you asked.

“Um.” I sat down. “Shouldn’t they all be equal?”

“Not when you figure in the Get Out of Jail cards and stuff like that. It’s Illinois.”

I glanced down. You had built three hotels on Illinois Avenue.

And Amelia had left me with sixty dollars.

“How did you know that?” I asked.

“I read. And I like to know things no one else does.”

I bet there was a great deal you knew that none of us did, or ever would. It was a little disconcerting to be sitting with an almost-six-year-old whose vocabulary probably rivaled mine. “So tell me something I don’t know,” I said.

“Dr. Seuss invented the word nerd.”

I laughed out loud. “Really?”

You nodded. “In If I Ran the Zoo. Which isn’t as good as Green Eggs and Ham. Which is for babies, anyway,” you said. “I like Harper Lee better.”

“Harper Lee?” I repeated.

“Yeah. Haven’t you ever read To Kill a Mockingbird?”

“Sure. I just can’t believe you have.” This was the first conversation I’d really had with the little girl who was the eye in the storm of this lawsuit, and I realized something remarkable: I liked you. I liked you a lot. You were genuine and funny and smart, and maybe your bones broke every now and then. I liked you for dismissing your condition as the least important part of you—nearly as much as I disliked your mother for highlighting it.

“So, anyway, it was Amelia’s turn. Which means you get to roll,” you said.

I glanced down at the board. “You know what? I hate Monopoly.” I did, truly. I had bad flashbacks from my childhood of a cousin who embezzled when he was the banker, of games that lasted four nights in a row.

“You want to play something else?”

Turning to the hearth again, and its toy detritus, I spied a dollhouse. It was a miniature of your home, with its black shutters and bright red door; there were even flowering shrubs for landscaping and long woven tongues of carpet. “Wow,” I said, touching the shingles reverently. “This is amazing.”

“My dad made it.”

I lifted the house up on its platform and settled it on top of the Monopoly board. “I used to have a dollhouse.”

It had been my favorite toy. I remembered tufted red velvet chairs in the miniature living room, and an old-time piano that played music when I turned its crank. A claw-footed tub, and candy-striped wallpaper. It looked completely Victorian, nothing like the modern house where I had grown up; yet I used to pretend, as I organized the beds and sofas and kitchen furniture, that this was an alternate universe, the home where I might have lived if I hadn’t been given away.

“Look at this,” you said, and you showed me how the little porcelain toilet seat lifted up. I wondered if dollhouse men forgot to put it back down, too.

In the refrigerator were little wooden steaks and milk bottles, and a tiny carton of eggs lined up like seed pearls. I raised the hinge of a woven basket to find two splinters of knitting needles and a ball of yarn.

“This is where the sisters live,” you said, and you set mattresses onto the twin brass bed frames in one upstairs room. “And this is where their mom sleeps.” Next door, on the big bed, you placed two pillows and a crazy quilt the size of my palm. Then you took another blanket and pillow, and made up a bed on the pink satin couch in the parlor. “And this,” you said, “is for the daddy.”

Oh my God, I thought. How they’ve screwed you up.

Suddenly the front door opened and Charlotte entered, a winter chill caught in the folds of her coat. She was carrying groceries in recyclable green bags draped over her arms. “Oh, that’s your car,” she said, dumping the food onto the floor. “Amelia!” she called upstairs. “I’m home!”

“Yay,” Amelia’s voice drifted down, devoid of enthusiasm.

Maybe it wasn’t just you they were destroying.

Charlotte leaned down and kissed your forehead. “How you doing, sweet pea? You’re playing with the dollhouse. I haven’t seen you take that out in ages…”

“We have to talk,” I said, getting to my feet.

“Okay.” Charlotte bent to gather some of the grocery bags; I did the same and followed her into the kitchen. She began to unpack: orange juice, milk, broccoli. Macaroni and cheese, dishwashing detergent, Ziploc bags.

Bounty. Joy. Life: brands that were a recipe for existence.

“Guy Booker’s added a witness for the defense,” I said. “Your husband.”

Charlotte was holding a jar of pickles one moment, and the next, it had shattered all over the floor. “What did you say?”

“Sean’s testifying against you,” I said flatly.

“He can’t do that, can he?”

“Well, once he asked to be released from the lawsuit—”

“He did what?”

The smell of vinegar rose; brine pooled on the tile floor. “Charlotte,” I said, stunned. “He told me he talked to you first.”

“He hasn’t talked to me in weeks. How could he? How could he do this to us?”

You came into the kitchen then. “Did something break?”

Charlotte got down on her hands and knees and began to gather the pieces of glass. “Stay out of the kitchen, Willow.” I reached for the new roll of paper toweling just as Charlotte let out a sharp cry; a shard of glass had pierced her finger.

It was bleeding. Your eyes went wide, and I hustled you toward the living room again. “Go get your mom a Band-Aid,” I said.

By the time I got back to the kitchen, Charlotte was clutching her bloody hand against her shirt. “Marin,” she said, staring up at me. “What am I supposed to do?”

It was probably a new experience for you, going to the hospital when you weren’t the one who was hurt. But it became clear very quickly that your mother’s cut had gone too deep, that a Band-Aid alone wasn’t going to be the answer. I drove her to the ER, with you and Amelia sitting in the back of the car, your feet propped up on cardboard boxes full of legal folders. I waited while a doctor sewed two stitches into the tip of Charlotte’s ring finger, as you sat beside her and held her good hand tight. I offered to stop at the pharmacy to fill the prescription for Tylenol plus codeine, but Charlotte said they still had plenty of painkillers at home left from your last break.

“I’m fine,” she told me. “Really.” I almost believed her, too, and then I remembered the way she’d clutched your hand during the stitches, and what she still planned to say to a jury in a matter of weeks about you.

I went back to the office, although the day was shot to hell. I took Maisie’s guidelines for writing a letter to one’s birth mother out of my top desk drawer and read through them one last time.

Families were never what you wanted them to be. We all wanted what we couldn’t have: the perfect child, the doting husband, the mother who’d let us go. We lived in our grown-up dollhouses completely unaware that, at any moment, a hand might come in and change around everything we’d become accustomed to.

Hello, I scrawled.

I’ve probably written this letter a thousand times in my head, always reworking it to make sure it’s just right. It took me thirty-one years to start my search, although I’ve always wondered where I came from. I think I had to figure out first why I wanted to search—and I finally know the answer. I owe my birth parents a very big thank-you. And almost equally important, I feel like you’re owed the right to know that I’m alive, well, and happy.

I work for a law firm in Nashua. I attended college at UNH and then went to law school at the University of Maine. I volunteer monthly to give legal advice to those who can’t afford it. I’m not married, but I hope that one day I will be. I like to kayak, read, and eat anything that’s chocolate.

For many years I was reluctant to search for you, because I didn’t want to intrude or ruin anyone’s life. Then I had a health scare and realized I did not know enough about where I’d come from. To that end, I’d like to meet you and say thank you in person—for giving me the opportunity to become the woman I am now—but I will also respect your wishes if you aren’t ready to meet me now, or never will be.

I’ve written and rewritten this, read and reread it. It’s not perfect, and neither am I. But I’m finally brave, and I’d like to think that maybe I inherited that from you.

Sincerely, Marin Gates

Sean

The guys who were repaving this stretch of Route 4 had spent the last forty minutes debating who was hotter, Jessica Alba or Pamela Anderson. “Jessica’s one hundred percent real,” said one guy, who was wearing fingerless gloves and missing two-thirds of the teeth in his mouth. “No implants.”

“Like you know,” said the foreman of the road crew.

From down near the line of traffic, another worker held a Slow sign that might have been a warning for the cars and might equally have been a self-description. “Pam’s a thirty-six triple D—twenty-two—thirty-four,” he said. “You know who else got measurements like that? A freakin’ Barbie doll.”

I leaned against the hood of my cruiser, bundled up in my winter gear, trying to pretend I was stone-deaf. Construction details were my least favorite part of being a cop, and a necessary evil. Without my blues flashing, the odds of some idiot striking one of the workers increased dramatically. Another guy approached, his breath punctuating the air in white balloons. “Wouldn’t toss either of them out of bed,” he said. “Would be even better if they were both there at once.”

Here’s the funny thing: ask any of these guys, and they’d tell you I was a tough guy. That my badge and my Glock were enough to raise me a notch in their esteem. They’d do what I told them to do, and they expected drivers to do what I told them to do, too. What they didn’t know was that I was the worst kind of coward. At work, maybe, I could bark orders or collar criminals or throw my weight around; at home, I had taken to stealing out before anyone woke up; I had defected from Charlotte’s lawsuit without even having the guts to tell her I was going to do it.

I’d spent enough time lying awake at night attempting to convince myself that this was courageous—that I was trying to find a middle ground where you would know you were loved and wanted—but the truth was, I got something out of this, too. I became a hero again, instead of a guy who couldn’t manage to take care of his own family.

“Want to cast your vote, Sean?” the foreman asked.

“Wouldn’t want to steal any of your fun,” I said diplomatically.

“Oh, that’s right. You’re married. Not allowed to let that eye wander, not even onto Google…”

Ignoring him, I took a few steps forward as a car sped up through the intersection instead of slowing down. All I’d have to do was point at the driver and he’d take his foot off the gas. It was that simple: the fear that I’d actually write him a ticket would be enough to make him think twice about what he was doing. But this driver didn’t slow down, and as the car screamed to a stop in the center of the intersection, I realized two things simultaneously: (1) it was a woman driving, not a man; and (2) it was my wife’s car.

Charlotte got out of the van and slammed the door shut behind her. “You son of a bitch,” she said, striding over until she was close enough to start hitting me.

I grabbed her arms, acutely aware that she had stopped not only traffic but the work of the construction detail. I could feel their eyes on me. “I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I had to do it.”

“Did you think it could stay a secret until the trial?” Charlotte cried. “Maybe then everyone could have watched me when I found out my husband was a liar.”

“Which one of us is the liar?” I said, incredulous. “Excuse me if I’m not willing to whore myself for money.”

A bright flush rose on Charlotte’s cheeks. “Excuse me if I’m not willing to let my daughter suffer because we’re broke.”

In that instant, I noticed a few things: that the right taillight on Charlotte’s van had burned out. That she had a bandage wrapped around one finger on her left hand. That it had started to snow again. “Where are the girls?” I asked, trying to peer into the dark windows of the van.

“You have no right to ask that,” she said. “You gave up that right when you went to the lawyer’s office.”

“Where are the girls, Charlotte?” I demanded.

“Home.” She stepped away from me, her eyes bright with tears. “Somewhere I don’t ever want to see you again.”

Wheeling around, she walked back to the car. Before she could open the door, though, I blocked her. “How can’t you see it?” I whispered. “Until you started all this, there was nothing wrong with our family. Nothing. We had a decent house—”

“With a roof that leaks—”

“I have a steady job—”

“That pays nothing—”

“And our children had a great life,” I finished.

“What would you know about that?” Charlotte said. “You’re not the one who’s with Willow when we walk past the playground at her school and she watches kids doing things she’s never going to do—easy things, like jumping off the swings or playing kickball. She threw out the DVD of The Wizard of Oz, did you know that? It was in the kitchen trash because some horrible little kid at school called her a Munchkin.”

Just like that, I wanted to punch the little shit’s lights out—never mind that he was six years old. “She didn’t tell me.”

“Because she didn’t want you to fight her battles for her,” Charlotte said.

“Then why,” I asked, “are you doing it?”

Charlotte hesitated, and I realized I’d struck a nerve. “You can fool yourself, Sean, but you can’t fool me. Go ahead and make me out to be the bitch, the villain. Pretend you’re some white knight, if it works for you. It looks good on the surface, and you can tell yourself that you know her favorite color and the name of her favorite stuffed animal and what kind of jelly she likes on her peanut butter sandwiches. But that’s not what makes her who she is. Do you know what she talks about on the way home from school? Or what she’s most proud of? What she worries about? Do you know why she burst into tears last night and why, a week ago, she hid under her bed for an hour? Face it, Sean. You think you’re her conquering hero, but you don’t really know anything about Willow’s life.”

I flinched. “I know it’s worth living.”

She shoved me out of the way and got into the car, slamming the door and peeling away. I heard the furious honks of cars that had been stockpiled behind Charlotte’s van and turned around to find the construction foreman still staring at me. “Tell you what,” he said, “you can have Jessica and Pam.”

That night I drove to Massachusetts. I didn’t have any destination in mind, but I pulled off at random exits and swung through neighborhoods that were buttoned up tight for the night. I turned off my headlights and trolled the streets like a shark in the deep of the ocean. There is so much you can tell about a family from the place they live: plastic toys give you the ages of their kids; a string of Christmas lights flag their religious affiliation; the kinds of cars in the driveway call out soccer mom or teenage driver or NASCAR fan. But even at the houses that were nondescript, I had no problem imagining the people inside. I would close my eyes and picture a father at the dinner table, making his daughters laugh. A mother who cleared the plates, but not before she touched the man’s shoulder in passing. I’d see a bookshelf full of bedtime stories, a stone paperweight crudely painted to look like a ladybug pinning down the day’s mail, a fresh stack of clean laundry. I’d hear the Patriots game on a Sunday afternoon, and Amelia’s iTunes playing through a speaker shaped like a donut, and your bare feet shuffling down the hallway.

I must have gone to fifty different houses like this. Occasionally, I’d find a light on—usually upstairs, usually a teenager’s head silhouetted against the blue cast of a computer screen. Or a couple that had fallen asleep with the television still crackling. A bathroom light, to keep monsters away from a child. It didn’t matter if I was in a white neighborhood or a black one, if the community was wealthy or dirt-poor—houses are cellular walls; they keep our problems from bleeding into everyone else’s.

The last neighborhood I visited that night was the one that drew my truck magnetically, my heart’s polar north. I parked at the base of my own driveway, headlights switched off, so that I would not give my presence away.

The truth was, Charlotte was right. The more times I picked up shifts to pay for your incidentals, the less time I spent with you. Once, I’d held you in my arms while you slept, and I’d watched dreams screening across your face; now, I loved you in theory if not in practice. I was too busy protecting and serving the rest of Bankton to focus on protecting and serving you; that had fallen to Charlotte instead. It was a treadmill, and I’d been knocked off it by this lawsuit, only to find that you were impossibly, undeniably, growing up.

That would change, I vowed. Carrying through with the step I’d taken when I went to Booker, Hood & Coates meant that I would actively spend more time with you. I’d get to fall for you all over again.

Just then, the wind whipped through the open window of the truck, wrinkling the wrappers of the baked goods and reminding me why I’d come back here tonight. Stacked in a wheelbarrow were the cookies and cakes and pastries that you and Amelia and Charlotte had been baking for the past few days.

I’d loaded them all—easily thirty wrapped packets, each one tagged with a green string and a construction paper heart—into my truck. You’d cut those out yourself; I could tell. Sweets from Syllabub, they read. I’d imagined your mother’s hands stroking pastry dough, the look on your face as you carefully cracked an egg, Amelia frustrating her way through an apron’s knot. I came here a couple times a week. I’d eat the first three or four; the rest I’d leave on the steps at the nearest homeless shelter.

I reached into my wallet and took out all my money, the cashed sum of the extra shifts I’d taken on at work to keep from having to go home. This I stuffed, bill by bill, into the shoe box, payment in kind for Charlotte. Before I could stop myself, I tore the paper heart off one packet of cookies. With a pencil, I wrote a customer’s message across the blank back: I love them.

Tomorrow, you’d read it. All three of you would be giddy, would assume the anonymous writer had been talking about the food, and not the bakers.

Amelia

On the way home from Boston one weekend, my mother reinvented herself as the new Martha Freaking Stewart. To that end, we had to detour totally out of the way to Norwich, Vermont, to King Arthur Flour, so that we could buy a crapload of industrial baking pans and specialty flours. You were already cranky about spending the morning at Children’s Hospital having new braces fitted—they were hot and stiff and left marks and bruises where the plastic rubbed into your skin, which the brace specialists tried to fix with a heat gun, but it never seemed to work. You wanted to go home and take them off, but instead, my mother bribed us with a trip to a restaurant—a reward neither one of us could turn down.

This may not seem like such a big deal, but it was, to us. We didn’t eat out very much. My mom always said that she could cook better than most chefs anyway, which was true, but that really just made us sound less like losers than the truth: we couldn’t afford it. It was the same reason that I didn’t tell my parents when my jeans were becoming highwaters, why I never bought lunch although the French fries in the caf looked so incredibly delicious; it was the same reason why that Disney World Trip to Hell was so much of a disappointment. I was too embarrassed to hear my parents tell me that we were too broke to afford what I needed or wanted; if I didn’t ask for anything, I didn’t have to hear them say no.

There was a part of me that was angry my mother was using the baking money to buy all those pans and tins when she could have been buying me a Juicy Couture cashmere hoodie that would make other girls in school look at me with envy, instead of like I was something stuck to the bottoms of their shoes. But no, it was critical that we have Mexican vanilla extract and dried Bing cherries from Michigan. We had to have silicone muffin pans and a shortbread form and edgeless cookie sheets. You were totally oblivious to the fact that every penny we spent on turbinado sugar and cake flour was one less cent spent on us, but then again, what did I expect: you still believed there was a Santa Claus, too.

So I have to admit it surprised me a little when you let me choose the restaurant where we’d eat lunch. “Amelia never gets to pick,” you said, and even though I hated myself for this, I felt like I was going to cry.

To make up for that, and because everyone expected me to be a jerk and why disappoint, I said, “McDonald’s.”

“Eww,” you said. “They make four hundred Quarter Pounders out of one cow.”

“Get back to me when you’re a vegetarian, hypocrite,” I answered.

“Amelia, stop. We’re not going to McDonald’s.”

So instead of picking a nice Italian place we probably all would have enjoyed, I made her stop at a totally skanky diner instead.

It looked like the kind of place that had bugs in the kitchen. “Well,” my mother said, looking around. “This is an interesting choice.”

“It’s nostalgic,” I said, and I glared at her. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, as long as botulism isn’t one of your long-lost memories.” After glancing at a Seat Yourself sign, she walked toward an empty booth.

“I want to sit at the counter,” you said.

My mother and I both looked at the rickety stools, the long drop down. “No,” we said simultaneously.

I dragged a high chair over to the table so that you could reach it. A harried waitress tossed menus at us, with a pack of crayons for you. “Be back in a minute for your order.”

My mother guided your legs through the high chair, which was an ordeal, because with braces your legs didn’t move that easily. Right away you flipped over your place mat and began to draw on the blank side. “So,” my mother said. “What should we bake when we get home?”

“Donuts,” you suggested. You were pretty psyched about the pan we’d bought, which looked like sixteen alien eyes.

“Amelia, what about you?”

I buried my face in my arms. “Hash brownies.”

The waitress reappeared with a pad in hand. “Well, aren’t you just cute enough to spread on a cracker and eat,” she said, grinning down at you. “And a mighty fine artist, too!”

I caught your gaze and rolled my eyes. You poked two crayons up your nose and stuck out your tongue. “I’ll have coffee,” Mom said. “And the turkey club.”

“There’s more than one hundred chemicals in a cup of coffee,” you announced, and the waitress nearly fell over.

Because we didn’t go out much, I’d forgotten how strangers reacted to you. You were only as tall as a three-year-old, but you spoke and read and drew like someone much older than your real age—almost six. It was sort of freaky, until people got to know you. “Isn’t she just a talkative little thing!” the waitress said, recovering.

“I’ll have the grilled cheese, please,” you replied. “And a Coke.”

“Yeah, that sounds good. Make it two,” I said, when what I really wanted was one of everything on the menu. The waitress was staring at you as you drew a picture that was about normal for a six-year-old but practically Renoir for the toddler she assumed you to be. She looked like she was going to say something to you, so I turned to my mother. “Are you sure you want turkey? That’s, like, food poisoning waiting to happen…”

“Amelia!”

She was mad, but it got the waitress to stop ogling you and leave.

“She’s an idiot,” I said as soon as the waitress was gone.

“She doesn’t know that—” My mother broke off abruptly.

“What?” you accused. “That there’s something wrong with me?”

“I would never say that.”

“Yeah, right,” I muttered. “Not unless the jury’s present.”

“So help me, Amelia, if your attitude doesn’t—”

I was saved by the waitress, who reappeared holding our drinks, in glasses that probably were see-through plastic in a former life but now just looked filmy. Your Coke was in a sippy cup.

Automatically, my mother reached out and began to unscrew the top. You took a drink, then picked up your crayon and began writing across the top of your picture: Me, Amelia, Mommy, Daddy.

“Oh, my God,” the waitress said. “I have a three-year-old at home and let me tell you, I can barely get her potty trained. But your daughter’s already writing? And drinking out of a regular cup. Honey, I don’t know what you’re doing right, but I want to get me some of that.”

“I’m not three,” you said.

“Oh.” The waitress winked. “Three and a half, right? Those months count when they’re babies—”

“I’m not a baby!”

“Willow.” Mom put a hand on your arm, but you threw it off, knocking over the cup and sending Coke all over the place.

“I’m not!”

Mom grabbed a stack of napkins and started mopping. “I’m sorry,” she said to the waitress.

“Now that”—the waitress nodded—“looks more like three.”

A bell rang, and she left to go back in the kitchen.

“Willow, you know better,” my mother said. “You can’t get angry at someone because she didn’t know you have OI.”

“Why not?” I asked. “You are.”

My mother’s jaw dropped. Recovering, she grabbed her purse and jacket and stood up. “We’re leaving,” she announced, and she yanked you out of your chair. At the last minute she remembered the drinks and slapped a ten-dollar bill on the table. Then she carried you out to the car, with me trailing behind.

We went to McDonald’s on the way home after all, but instead of making me feel satisfied, it made me want to disappear underneath the tires, the pavement, all of it.

I had braces, too, but not the kind that kept my legs from bowing. Mine were the ordinary kind, the ones that had changed the whole shape of my head during the progression from palate expander to bands to wires. This much I had in common with you: the very second I got my braces, I began counting the days until they would be taken off. For those who’ve never had the displeasure, this is what braces feel like: you know those fake white vampire teeth you stick in your mouth at Halloween? Well, imagine that, and then imagine that they stay there for the next three years, with you drooling and cutting your gums on the uneven plastic bits, and that would be braces.

Which is why, one particular Monday in late January, I had the biggest, soppiest smile on my face. I didn’t care when Emma and her posse wrote the word WHORE on the blackboard behind me in math class, with an arrow that pointed down at my head. I didn’t care when you ate all the Cocoa Puffs so that I had to have Frosted Mini-Wheats as a snack after school. All that mattered was that at 4:30 p.m. I was getting my braces off, after thirty-four months, two weeks, and six days.

My mother was playing it incredibly cool—apparently she didn’t realize what a big deal this was. I’d checked; it was right on her calendar, like it had been for the past five months. I started to panic, though, when it was four o’clock and she set a cheesecake into the oven. I mean, how could she drive me into town to the orthodontist and not have to worry if her knife slipped out clean in an hour when she tested it?

My father, that had to be the answer. He hadn’t been around much, but then again, that wasn’t radical. Cops worked when they had to, not when they wanted to—or so he used to tell me. The difference was that, when he was home, you could cut the air between him and my mother with that same knife she was using to test her cheesecake.

Maybe this was all part of a calculated plan to throw me off. My father was going to show up in time to take me to the orthodontist; my mother would finish baking the cheesecake (which was my favorite anyway) and it would be part of a big ol’ dinner that included things like corn on the cob, caramel apples, and bubble gum—all forbidden foods that were written on the reminder magnet on our fridge with a fat X across it, and for once, I’d be the one everybody could not take their eyes off.

I sat at the kitchen table, scuffing my sneaker on the floor. “Amelia,” my mother sighed.

Squeak.

“Amelia. For God’s sake. You’re giving me a headache.”

It was 4:04. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

She wiped her hands on a dish towel. “Not that I know of…”

“Well, when’s Dad going to get here?”

She stared at me. “Honey,” she said, the word that’s a sweet, so that you know whatever’s coming next has to be awful. “I don’t know where your father is. He and I…we haven’t…”

“My appointment,” I burst out, before she could say anything else. “Who’s taking me to the orthodontist?”

For a moment, she was speechless. “You must be joking.”

“After three years? I don’t think so.” I stood up, poking my finger at the calendar on the wall. “I’m getting my braces off today.”

“You are not going to Rob Reece’s office,” my mother said.

Okay, that’s the detail I left out: the only orthodontist in Bankton—the one I’d been seeing all this time—happened to be married to the woman she was suing. Granted, due to all the drama, I’d missed a couple of appointments since September, but I had no intention of skipping this one. “Just because you’re on some crusade to ruin Piper’s life, I have to leave my braces on till I’m forty?”

My mother held her hand up to her head. “Not till you’re forty. Just until I find you another orthodontist. For God’s sake, Amelia, it slipped my mind. I’ve obviously had a lot going on lately.”

“Yeah, you and every other human on this planet, Mom,” I yelled. “Guess what? It’s not all about you and what you want and what makes everyone feel sorry for your miserable life with some miserable—”

She slapped me across the face.

My mother had never, ever hit me. Not even when I ran into traffic when I was two, not even when I poured nail polish remover on the dining room table and destroyed the finish. My cheek hurt, but not as much as my chest. My heart had turned into a ball of rubber bands, and they were snapping, one by one.

I wanted her to hurt as much as she’d hurt me, so I spat out the words that burned like acid in my throat. “Bet you wish I’d never been born, too,” I said, and I took off running.

By the time I got to Rob’s office (I’d never called him Dr. Reece), I was sweaty and red-faced. I don’t think I’d ever run five whole miles in my life, but that’s what I had just done. Guilt is a better fuel than you can imagine. I was practically the Energizer Bunny, and it had a lot less to do with getting closer to the orthodontist than it did with getting away from my mother. Panting, I walked up to the receptionist’s desk, where there was a nifty computer kiosk to sign in. But I had only just settled my fingers on the keyboard when I noticed the receptionist staring at me. And the dental hygienist. And in fact, every single person in the office.

“Amelia,” the receptionist says. “What are you doing here?”

“I have an appointment.”

“I think we all just assumed—”

“Assumed what?” I interrupted. “That just because my mother’s a jerk, I’m one, too?”

Suddenly Rob stepped into the reception area, snapping a pair of rubber gloves off his hands. He used to blow them up for Emma and me, and draw little faces on them. The fingers looked like the comb of a rooster and felt as soft as a baby’s skin.

“Amelia,” he said quietly. He wasn’t smiling, not one iota. “I guess you’re here about your braces.”

It felt like I had been walking in a forest for the past few months, a place where even the trees might reach out to grab you and nobody spoke English—and Rob had said the first rational, normal sentence I’d heard in a long time. He knew what I wanted. If it was so easy for him, why did nobody else seem to get it?

I followed him into the examination room, past the snarky receptionist and the dental hygienist whose eyes went so wide I thought they might pop out of her head. Ha, I thought, walking beside him proudly. Take that.

I expected Rob to say something like Look, let’s just get this over with and keep it strictly business, but instead, as he settled the paper bib over my shoulders, he said, “Are things okay for you, Amelia?”

God, why couldn’t Rob have been my father? Why couldn’t I have lived in the Reece household, and Emma could have been in mine, so I could hate her instead of the other way around?

“Compared to what? Armageddon?”

He was wearing a mask, but I pretended that, behind it, he cracked a smile. I’d always liked Rob. He was geeky and small, not at all like my father. At sleepovers Emma would tell me my father was movie-star handsome and I’d tell her it was gross that she even thought about him like that; and she’d say if her dad was ever in a movie, it would be Revenge of the Nerds. And maybe that was true, but he also didn’t mind taking us to movies that starred Amanda Bynes or Hilary Duff, and he let us play with brace wax and fashion it into little bears and ponies when we were bored.

“I’d forgotten how funny you can be,” Rob said. “Okay, open up…You may feel a little pressure.” He picked up a pair of pliers and began to break the bonds between the brackets and my teeth. It felt weird, like I was bionic. “Does that hurt?”

I shook my head.

“Emma doesn’t talk much about you these days.”

I couldn’t speak, because his hands were in my wide-open mouth. But here’s what I would have said: That’s because she’s become an überbitch, and she hates my guts.

“It’s obviously a very uncomfortable situation,” Rob said. “I have to admit I never thought your mother would let you come back to me for orthodontic care.”

She didn’t.

“You know, orthodontics is really just physics,” Rob said. “If you had brackets or bands on crooked teeth alone, it wouldn’t do anything. But when you apply force in different ways, things change.” He looked down at me, and I knew that he wasn’t talking about my teeth anymore. “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

Rob was cleaning the composite and cement off my teeth. I lifted my hand and put it to his wrist, so that he’d remove the electric toothbrush. My spit tasted tinny. “She’s ruined my life, too,” I said, and because of the saliva, it sounded like I was drowning.

Rob looked away. “You’ll have to wear a retainer, or else there could be some shifting. Let’s get some X-rays and impressions, so that we can make one up for you—” Then he frowned, touching a tool to the backs of my two front teeth. “The enamel’s worn down a lot here.”

Well, of course it was; I was making myself puke three times a day, not that you’d know it. I was just as fat as ever, because when I wasn’t puking, I was stuffing my disgusting face. I held my breath, wondering if this would be the moment someone realized what I’d been doing. I wondered if I’d actually been waiting for that all along.

“Have you been drinking a lot of soda?”

The excuse made me feel weak. I nodded quickly.

“Don’t,” Rob said. “They use Coke to clean up blood spills on highways, you know. Do you really want that in your body?”

It sounded like something you would have told me, from one of your trivia books. And that made my eyes fill with tears.

“Sorry,” Rob said, lifting his hands. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Me neither, I thought.

He finished polishing my teeth with the toothpaste that felt like sand and let me rinse. “That is one gorgeous occlusion,” he said, and he held up a mirror. “Smile, Amelia.”

I ran my tongue over my teeth, something I hadn’t been able to do in nearly three years. The teeth felt huge, slick, like they belonged in someone else’s mouth. I bared them—not a smile but more of a wolf’s grimace. The girl in the mirror had neat rows of teeth, like the string of pearls in my mother’s jewelry box that I’d stolen and hidden in one of my shoe boxes. I never wore them, but I liked the way they felt, so smooth and uniform, like a little army marching around your neck. The girl in the mirror could almost be pretty.

Which meant she couldn’t be me.

“Here’s something we give out to kids who’ve completed treatment,” Rob said, handing me a little plastic bag with his name printed on it. “Thanks,” I muttered, and I leapt out of the chair, yanking the bib off.

“Amelia—wait. Your retainer—” Rob said, but by then, I had already fled into the reception area and out the front door. Instead of heading downstairs and out of the building, though, I ran upstairs, where they wouldn’t think to come after me (Not that they would. I wasn’t really that important, was I?), and locked myself in the bathroom. I opened the goody bag. There were Twizzlers and gummy bears and popcorn, all foods I hadn’t eaten in so long I couldn’t even remember how they tasted. There was a T-shirt that read SHIFT HAPPENS, SO WEAR YOUR RETAINER.

The toilet bowl had a black seat. With one hand I held my hair back, with the other, I stuck my index finger down my throat. Here’s what Rob hadn’t noticed: the little scab on that finger, which came from digging into my front teeth every time I did this.

Afterward, my teeth felt fuzzy and dirty and familiar again. I rinsed my mouth out with water from the sink and then looked in the mirror. My cheeks were flushed, my eyes bright.

I did not look like someone whose life was falling apart. I did not look like a girl who had to make herself vomit to feel like she could do something right. I did not look like the kind of daughter who was hated by her mother, ignored by her father.

To be honest, I didn’t know who the hell I was anymore at all.

Piper

In four months, I had been reborn. Once, I’d used a paper tape ruler to determine fundal height, now I knew how to figure out a rough opening for windows using a measuring tape. Once, I had used a Doppler stethoscope to hear fetal heart tones; now I used a stud finder to locate the sweet spots behind a plaster wall. Once, I’d done quadruple screens, now I installed screen porches. I had applied myself to the task of learning as much about remodeling as I had about medicine, and as a result, I could have been board-certified as a contractor by now.

I had first remodeled the bathroom, then the dining room. I pulled up the carpets in the upstairs bedrooms to install parquet floors instead. I was planning to start faux-painting the kitchen this week. After a room was finished, it went back on my list to be renovated again, eventually.

There was, of course, a method to my madness. Part of it was feeling proficient at something again—something I hadn’t known how to do before so I couldn’t possibly mess up. And part of it was thinking that, if I changed every bit of my surroundings, I might be able to find a spot where I felt comfortable again.

My refuge of choice had become Aubuchon Hardware. No one I knew shopped at Aubuchon Hardware. Whereas I might run into former patients at the grocery store or the pharmacy, at Aubuchon I blissfully wandered the aisles in a state of complete anonymity. I went three or four times a week and gazed at the laser levels and the drill bits, the soldier rows of two-by-fours, the bloated tubes of PVC and their delicate cousins, copper piping. I sat on the floor with paint chips, whispering the names of the colors: Mulberry Wine, Riviera Azure, Cool Lava. They sounded like vacation photographs of places I’d always wanted to go.

Newburyport Blue was from Benjamin Moore’s Historical Colors collection. It was a dark, grayish blue, like the ocean when it rains. I’d actually been to Newburyport. One summer, Charlotte and I had rented a house on Plum Island for our families. You were still small enough to be toted, with all the gear, through the tall grass to the beach. In theory, it had seemed like the perfect vacation: the sand was soft enough to break your fall; Emma and Amelia could pretend to be mermaids, with seaweed hair that had washed up on the shore; and it was close enough for Sean and Rob to commute down on their days off. There was only one caveat we hadn’t anticipated: the water was so cold that even standing up to your ankles made you ache to the core of your privates. You kids spent your days splashing in tide pools, which were shallow enough to be heated by the sun, but Charlotte and I were too big for those.

Which is why one Sunday, when the guys had taken you kids to Mad Martha’s for breakfast, Charlotte and I decided to try boogie boarding, even if it resulted in severe hypothermia. We shimmied into our wet suits (“They’re supposed to be tight,” I told Charlotte when she moaned about the size of her hips) and carried the boards down to the water’s edge. I dipped my foot into the line of surf and gasped. “There’s no way,” I said, jumping backward.

Charlotte smirked at me. “Getting cold feet?”

“Very funny,” I said, but to my shock, she’d already begun high-stepping over the waves, frigid as they were, and swimming out to a point where she could ride one in.

“How bad is it?” I yelled.

“Like an epidural—I don’t have feeling below my waist,” she shouted back, and then suddenly the ocean heaved, flexing one long muscle that lifted Charlotte on her board and sent her screaming through the surf to land at my feet on the sand.

She stood up, pushing her hair out of her face. “Chicken,” she accused, and to prove her wrong, I held my breath and started wading into the water.

My God, it was cold. I paddled out on my board, bobbing beside Charlotte. “We’re going to die,” I said. “We’re going to die out here and someone’s going to find our bodies on the shore, like Emma found that tennis shoe yesterday—”

“Here we go,” Charlotte shouted, and I looked over my shoulder to see an enormous wall of water looming down on us. “Paddle,” Charlotte yelled, and I did what she told me to do.

But I hadn’t caught the wave. Instead, it crashed over me, knocking the breath from my lungs and tumbling me end over end underwater. My boogie board, roped to my wrist, smacked me on the head twice, and then I felt sand being ground into my hair and my face, my fingers clawing at broken shells, as the ocean floor rose at an angle beneath me. Suddenly, a hand grabbed the back of my wet suit and dragged me forward. “Stand up,” Charlotte said, using all her weight to move me far enough onto the sand to keep from getting pulled back by the tide.

I had swallowed a quart of salt water; my eyes were burning, and there was blood on my cheek and my palms. “Jesus Christ,” I said, coughing and wiping my nose.

Charlotte pounded me on the back. “Just breathe.”

“Harder…than it sounds.”

Slowly feeling returned to my fingers and my feet, and that was worse, because I’d been beaten up badly by the wave. “Thanks…for being my lifeguard.”

“The heck with that,” Charlotte said. “I didn’t want to have to pay for the second half of the rental house.”

I laughed out loud. Charlotte helped me to my feet, and we began to trudge up the beach, dragging the boards behind us like puppies on leashes. “What should we tell the guys?” I asked.

“That Kelly Slater signed us for the world championships.”

“Yeah, that’ll explain why my cheek is bleeding.”

“He was overcome by the beauty of my butt in this wet suit, and when he made a pass at me you had to beat him off,” Charlotte suggested.

The reeds were whispering secrets. To the left was a swath of sand where Amelia and Emma had been playing yesterday, writing their names with sticks. They wanted to see if the writing would still be there today, or if the tide would have washed it away.

Amelia and Emma, it read.

BFFAA. Best friends forever and always.

I linked my arm with Charlotte’s, and together we started the long climb to the house.

It struck me, now, as I sat on the floor of Aubuchon Hardware, with a flamenco fan of color chips in my hand, that I had never been back to Newburyport since then. Charlotte and I had talked about it, but she hadn’t wanted to commit to renting a house not knowing if you’d be in a cast that following summer. Maybe Emma and Rob and I would go down there next summer.

But I wouldn’t go, I knew that. I really didn’t want to, without Charlotte.

I took a quart of paint off the shelf and walked to the mixing station at the end of the aisle. “Newburyport Blue, please,” I said, although I did not have a particular wall in mind to paint it on yet. I’d keep it in the basement, just in case.

It was dark by the time I left Aubuchon Hardware, and when I got back home, Rob was washing plates and putting them into the dishwasher. He didn’t even look at me when I walked into the kitchen, which is why I knew he was furious. “Just say it,” I said.

He turned off the faucet and slammed the door of the dishwasher into place. “Where the hell have you been?”

“I…I lost track of time. I was at the hardware store.”

“Again? What could you possibly need there?”

I sank down into a chair. “I don’t know, Rob. It’s just the place that makes me feel good right now.”

“You know what would make me feel good?” he said. “A wife.”

“Wow, Rob, I didn’t think you’d ever go all Ricky Ricardo on me—”

“Did you forget something today?”

I stared at him. “Not that I know of.”

“Emma was waiting for you to drive her to the rink.”

I closed my eyes. Skating. The new session had started; I was supposed to sign her up for private lessons so that she could compete this spring—something her last coach finally felt she was ready for. It was first come, first served; this might have blown her chance for the season. “I’ll make it up to her—”

“You don’t have to, because she called, hysterical, and I left the office to get her down there in time.” He sat down across from me, tilting his head. “What do you do all day, Piper?”

I wanted to point out to him the new tile floor in the mudroom, the fixture I’d rewired over this very table. But instead I looked down at my hands. “I don’t know,” I whispered. “I really don’t know.”

“You have to get your life back. If you don’t, she’s already won.”

“You don’t know what this is like—”

“I don’t? I’m not a doctor, too? I don’t carry malpractice insurance?”

“That’s not what I mean and you—”

“I saw Amelia today.”

I stared at him. “Amelia?”

“She came to the office to get her braces off.”

“There’s no way Charlotte would have—”

“Hell hath no fury like a teenager who wants her orthodontia removed,” Rob said. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure Charlotte had no idea she was there.”

I felt heat rise to my face. “Don’t you think people might wonder why you’re treating the daughter of the woman who’s suing us?”

“You,” he corrected. “She’s suing you.”

I reeled backward. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

“And I can’t believe you’d expect me to throw Amelia out of the office.”

“Well, you know what, Rob? You should have. You’re my husband.”

Rob got to his feet. “And she’s a patient. And that’s my job. Something, unlike you, that I give a damn about.”

He stalked out of the kitchen, and I rubbed my temples. I felt like a plane in a holding pattern, making the turns with the airport in view and no clearance to land. In that moment, I resented Charlotte so much that it felt like a river stone in my belly, solid and cold. Rob was right—everything I was, everything I’d been—had been put on a shelf because of what Charlotte had done to me.

And in that instant I realized that Charlotte and I still had something in common: she felt exactly the same way about what I’d done to her.

The next morning, I was determined to change. I set my alarm, and instead of sleeping past the school bus pickup, I made Emma French toast and bacon for breakfast. I told a wary Rob to have a nice day. Instead of renovating the house, I cleaned it. I went grocery shopping—although I drove to a town thirty miles away, where I wouldn’t run into anyone familiar. I met Emma at school with her skating bag. “You’re taking me to the rink?” she said when she saw me.

“Is that a problem?”

“I guess not,” Emma said, and after a moment’s hesitation, she launched into a diatribe about how unfair it was for the teacher to give an algebra test when he knew he was going to be absent that day and couldn’t answer last-minute questions.

I’ve missed this, I thought. I’ve missed Emma. I reached across the seat and smoothed my hand over her hair.

“What’s up with that?”

“I just really love you. That’s all.”

Emma raised a brow. “Okay, now you’re skeeving me out. You aren’t going to tell me you have cancer or something, are you?”

“No, I just know I haven’t exactly been…present…lately. And I’m sorry.”

We were at a red light, and she faced me. “Charlotte’s a bitch,” she said, and I didn’t even tell her to watch her language. “Everybody knows the whole Willow thing isn’t your fault.”

“Everybody?”

“Well,” she said. “Me.”

That’s good enough, I realized.

A few minutes later, we arrived at the skating rink. Red-cheeked boys dribbled out of the main glass doors, their enormous hockey bags turtled onto their backs. It always had seemed so funny to me, the dichotomy between the coltish figure skaters and the lupine hockey players.

The minute I walked inside I realized what I’d forgotten—no, not forgotten, just blocked entirely from my mind: Amelia would be here, too.

She looked so different from the last time I’d seen her—dressed in black, with fingerless gloves and tattered jeans and combat boots—and that blue hair. And she was arguing heatedly with Charlotte. “I don’t care who hears,” she said. “I told you I don’t want to skate anymore.”

Emma grabbed my arm. “Just go,” she said under her breath.

But it was too late. We were a small town and this was a big story; the entire room, girls and their mothers, was waiting to see what would happen. And you, sitting on the bench beside Amelia’s bag, noticed me, too.

You had a cast on your right arm. How had you broken it this time? Four months ago, I would have known all the details.

Well, unlike Charlotte, I had no intention of airing my dirty laundry in public. I drew in my breath and pulled Emma closer, dragging her into the locker room. “Okay,” I said, pushing my hair out of my eyes. “So, you do this private lesson thing for how long? An hour?”

“Mom.”

“I may just run out and pick up the dry cleaning, instead of hanging around to watch—”

“Mom.” Emma reached for my hand, as if she were still little. “You weren’t the one who started this.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to say anything else. Here is what I had expected from my best friend: honesty. If she had spent the past six years of your life harboring the belief that I’d done something grievously wrong during her pregnancy, why didn’t she ever bring it up? Why didn’t she ever say, Hey, how come you didn’t…? Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything. But I did. Like, for starters, an explanation.

Emma finished lacing up her skates and hurried onto the ice. I waited a moment, then pushed out the locker room door and stood in front of the curved Plexiglas barrier. At one end of the rink was a tangle of beginners—a centipede of children in their snow pants and bicycle helmets, their legs widening triangles. When one went down, so did the others: dominoes. It wasn’t so long ago that this had been Emma, and yet here she was on the other end of the rink, executing a sit-spin as her teacher skated around her, calling out corrections.

I couldn’t see Amelia—or you or Charlotte for that matter—anywhere.

My pulse was almost back to normal by the time I reached my car. I slid into the driver’s seat, turned on the engine. When I heard a sharp rap on the window, I nearly jumped out of my skin.

Charlotte stood there, a scarf wrapped around her nose and mouth, her eyes watering in the bite of the wind. I hesitated, then unrolled the window partway.

She looked as miserable as I felt. “I…I just had to tell you something,” she said, halting. “This was never about you and me.”

The effort of not speaking hurt; I was grinding my back teeth together.

“I was offered a chance to give Willow everything she’ll ever need.” Her breath formed a wreath around her face in the cold air. “I don’t blame you for hating me. But you can’t judge me, Piper. Because if Willow had been your child…I know you would have done the same thing.”

I let the words hang between us, caught on the guillotine of the window’s edge. “You don’t know me as well as you think you do, Charlotte,” I said coldly, and I pulled out of the parking spot and away from the rink without looking back.

Ten minutes later I burst into Rob’s office during a consultation. “Piper,” he said evenly, glancing down at the parents and preteen daughter, who were staring at my wild hair, my runny nose, the tears still streaking my face. “I’m in the middle of something.”

“Um,” the mother said quickly. “Maybe we should just let you two talk.”

“Mrs. Spifield—”

“No, really,” she said, getting up and summoning the rest of the family. “We can give you a minute.”

They hurried out of the office, expecting me to self-destruct at any moment, and maybe they weren’t that far off the mark. “Are you happy?” Rob exploded. “You probably just cost me a new patient.”

“How about Piper, what happened? Tell me what I can do to help you?”

“Well, pardon me if the sympathy card’s been played so often that the face has worn straight off. Jesus, I’m trying to run a practice here.”

“I just ran into Charlotte at the skating rink.”

Rob blinked at me. “So?”

“Are you joking?”

“You live in the same town. A small town. It’s a miracle you haven’t crossed paths before. What did she do? Come after you with a sword? Call you out on the playground? Grow up, Piper.”

I felt like the bull must when he is let out of his pen. Freedom, relief…and then comes the picador, lancing him. “I’m going to leave,” I said softly. “I’m going to pick up Emma, and before you come home tonight, I hope you’ll think about the way you treated me.”

“The way I treated you?” Rob said. “I have been nothing but supportive. I have not said a word, even though you’ve abandoned your whole OB practice and turned into some female Ty Pennington. We get a lumber bill for two thousand dollars? No problem. You forget Emma’s chorus recital because you’re talking plumbing at Aubuchon Hardware? Forgiven. I mean, how ironic is it that you’ve become the do-it-yourself queen? Because you don’t want our help. You want to wallow in self-pity instead.”

“It’s not self-pity.” My cheeks were burning. Could the Spifields hear us arguing in the waiting room? Could the hygienists?

“I know what you want from me, Piper. I’m just not sure I can do it anymore.” Rob walked to the window, looking out onto the parking lot. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Steven,” he said after a moment.

When Rob was twelve, his older brother had committed suicide. Rob had been the one to find him, hanging from the rod in his closet. I knew all this; I’d known it since before we were married. It had taken me a while to convince Rob to have children, because he worried that his brother’s mental illness was printed in his genes. What I hadn’t known was that, these past few months, being with me had dragged Rob back to that time in his childhood.

“Back then no one knew the name for bipolar disorder, or how to take care of it. So for seventeen years my parents went through hell. My whole childhood was colored by how Steven was feeling: if it was a good day or a bad day. And,” he said, “it’s how I got so good at taking care of a person who is completely self-absorbed.”

I felt a splinter of guilt wedge into my heart. Charlotte had hurt me; in return, I’d hurt Rob. Maybe that’s what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we’ve wounded the people we are trying to protect. “Ever since you got served, I’ve been thinking about it. What if my parents had known in advance?” Rob said. “What if they had been told, before Steven was born, that he was going to kill himself before his eighteenth birthday?”

I felt myself go very still.

“Would they have taken those seventeen years to get to know him? To have those good times that came between the crises? Or would they have spared themselves—and me—that emotional roller coaster?”

I imagined Rob, coming into his brother’s room to get him for dinner, and finding the older boy slumped to the side of the closet. The whole time I’d known my mother-in-law, I’d never seen a smile rise all the way to her eyes. Was this why?

“That’s not a fair comparison,” I said stiffly.

“Why not?”

“Bipolar illness can’t be diagnosed in utero. You’re missing the point.”

Rob raised his gaze to meet mine. “Am I?” he said.

Marin

February 2008

“Just be yourselves,” I coached. “We don’t want you to do anything special because of the camera. Pretend we’re not here.”

I gave a nervous little smile and glanced at the twenty-two moon faces staring up at me: Ms. Watkins’s kindergarten class. “Does anyone have any questions?”

A little boy raised his hand. “Do you know Simon Cowell?”

“No,” I said, grinning. “Anyone else?”

“Is Willow a movie star?”

I glanced at Charlotte, who was standing just behind me, with the videographer I’d hired to film A Day in the Life of Willow, to be aired for the jury. “No,” I said. “She’s still just your friend.”

“Ooh! Ooh! Me!” A classically pretty destined-to-be-cheerleader girl pumped her hand like a piston until I pointed to her. “If I pretend to be Willow’s friend today, will I be on Entertainment Tonight?”

The teacher stepped forward. “No, Sapphire. And you shouldn’t have to pretend to be anyone’s friend in here. We’re all friends, right?”

“Yes, Ms. Watkins,” the class intoned.

Sapphire? That girl’s name was really Sapphire? I’d looked at the masking tape above the wooden cubbies when we first came in—names like Flint and Frisco and Cassidy. Did no one name their kids Tommy or Elizabeth anymore?

I wondered, not for the first time, if my birth mother had picked out names for me. If she’d called me Sarah or Abigail, a secret between the two of us that was overturned, like fresh earth, when my adoptive parents came and started my life over.

You were using your wheelchair today, which meant kids had to move out of the way to accommodate you if you approached with your aide to work at the art table or use Cuisenaire rods. “This is so strange,” Charlotte said softly. “I never get to watch her during school. I feel like I’ve been admitted to the inner sanctum.”

I had hired the camera crew to film one entire day with you. Although you were verbal enough to hold your own as a witness during this trial, putting you on the stand would not have been humane. I couldn’t bring myself to have you in the courtroom when your mother was testifying out loud about wanting to terminate her pregnancy.

We’d shown up on your doorstep at six a.m., in time to watch Charlotte come into your room to rouse you and Amelia. “Oh, my God, this sucks,” Amelia had groaned when she opened her eyes and saw the videographer. “The whole world’s going to see my bed hair.”

She had jumped up and run to the bathroom, but with you, it took more time. Every transition was careful—from the bed to the walker, from the walker to the bathroom, from the bathroom back to the bedroom to get dressed. Because mornings were the most painful for you—the curse of sleeping on a healing fracture—Charlotte had given you pain medication thirty minutes before we arrived, then let it start working to ease the soreness in your arm while you dozed for a while before she helped you get out of bed. Charlotte picked out a sweatshirt that zippered up the front so that you wouldn’t have to raise your arms to slip it over your head—your latest cast had been removed only a week ago and your upper arm was still stiff. “Besides your arm, what hurts today?” Charlotte asked.

You seemed to do a mental inventory. “My hip,” you said.

“Like yesterday, or worse?”

“The same.”

“Do you want to walk?” Charlotte asked, but you shook your head.

“The walker makes my arm ache,” you said.

“Then I’ll get the chair.”

“No! I don’t want to use the chair—”

“Willow, you don’t have a choice. I’m not going to carry you around all day.”

“But I hate the chair—”

“Then you’ll just have to work hard so you get out of it faster, right?”

Charlotte explained, on camera, that you were caught between a rock and a hard place—the arm injury, an old wound, was still healing, but the hip pain was new. The adaptive equipment—a walker to help you stand with support—meant putting pressure on your arm, which you could do for only short periods of time, and which left instead only the dreaded folding manual wheelchair. You hadn’t been fitted for a new one since you were two; at age six, you were nearly twice that size and complained of back and muscle pain after a full day’s use—but insurance wouldn’t upgrade your chair until you were seven.

I had expected a flurry of morning activity, made even more overwhelming by all of your needs, but Charlotte moved methodically—letting Amelia run around trying to find lost homework while she brushed your hair and fixed it in two braids, cooked scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast, and loaded you into the car along with the walker, the thirty-pound wheelchair, a standing table, and the braces—to use during physical therapy. You couldn’t take the bus—jarring over bumps could cause microfractures—so Charlotte drove you instead, dropping Amelia off at the middle school on the way.

I followed you in my own van. “What’s the big deal?” the cameraman asked when we were alone in the car. “She’s just small and disabled, so what?”

“She also can snap a bone if you hit the brakes,” I said. But there was a part of me that knew the cameraman was right. A jury watching Charlotte tie her daughter’s shoes and strap her into a car seat like an infant would think your life was no worse than any baby’s. What we needed was something more dramatic—a fall or, better yet, a fracture.

My God, what kind of person was I, wishing a six-year-old would get hurt?

At the school, Charlotte lugged the equipment out of the van and set it in a corner of the classroom. There was a quick powwow with the teacher and your aide, Charlotte explaining which injuries were bothering you today. Meanwhile, you sat in your chair near the cubbies as children funneled around you to hang up their jackets and take off their boots. Your shoelace had come untied, and although you tried to lean over to fix it, your foreshortened arms couldn’t quite span the distance. A little girl bent down to help you. “I just learned how to tie them,” she said, matter-of-fact, and she looped the laces and knotted them. As she bounced off, you watched her. “I know how to tie my own shoes,” you said, but your voice had an edge to it.

When it was time for snack, your aide had to lift you up to wash your hands, because the sink was too tall to accommodate your wheelchair. Five children jockeyed to sit next to you. But you got only about three minutes to eat because you were scheduled for physical therapy. That day alone, I’d learned, we’d be filming you at PT, OT, speech therapy, and visiting a prosthetic specialist. It made me wonder when or if you ever got to just be a kindergartner.

“How do you think it’s going so far?” Charlotte asked as we walked down the hall to the physical therapy room, trailing you and your wheelchair and your aide. “Do you think it will be enough for a jury?”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “That’s my job.”

The physical therapy room was adjacent to the gymnasium. Inside, on the gleaming floor, a teacher was setting a line of kickballs down. There was a wall of glass, through which you could watch what was going on in the gym. It seemed cruel to me. Was it supposed to inspire a kid like you to work harder? Or just depress the hell out of you?

Twice a week, you had PT with Molly in school. Once a week, you were taken to her office. She was a skinny redhead with a surprisingly low voice. “How’s the hip?”

“It still hurts,” you told her.

“Like I’d rather die than walk, Molly, hurts? Or just ouch, it hurts?”

You laughed. “Ouch.”

“Good. Then show me your stuff.”

She lifted you out of your chair and set you upright on the floor. I held my breath—I hadn’t seen you moving without a walker—and you began to shuffle your feet in tiny hiccups. Your right foot lifted off the floor, your left one dragged, until you paused at the edge of a red mat. It was only an inch thick, but it took you ten whole seconds to lift your left leg enough to gain the clearance.

She bounced a large red ball to the middle of the mat. “You want to start with this today?”

“Yes,” you said, and your face lit up.

“Your wish is my command,” Molly said, and she sat you down on the ball. “Show me how far you can reach with your left hand.”

You reached across your body, putting an S curve into your spine. Even giving it all your effort, you could barely keep your shoulders from facing squarely forward. This put your eyes in line with the window, where your classmates were engaged in a raucous game of dodgeball. “I wish I could do that,” you said.

“Keep stretching, Wonder Woman, and you just might,” Molly replied.

But this wasn’t really true—even if you learned enough flexibility to dodge and weave, your bones wouldn’t withstand a firm hit.

“You’re not missing anything,” I said. “I hated dodgeball. I was always the one picked last.”

“I’m the one picked never,” you said.

That, I thought, will be a great sound bite.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one. Charlotte glanced at the camera and then turned to the physical therapist, who had your belly bent over the ball and was rocking you back and forth. “Molly? How about using the ring?”

“I was going to hold off another week or two before I did any weight-bearing exercises—”

“Maybe we can work on the soft tissue? To improve her range?”

She settled you on the floor. The soles of your feet touched together, a yoga pose I could manage only on a good day. Reaching onto the wall, Molly untied what looked like a gymnastics ring, which was dangling from the ceiling. She adjusted the height until it hovered just over your head. “Right arm this time,” she said.

You shook your head. “I don’t want to.”

“Just give it a try. If it hurts too much, we’ll stop.”

You inched your arm higher, until your fingertips brushed the rubber ring. “Can we stop now?”

“Come on, Willow, I know you’re tougher than that,” Molly said. “Wrap your fingers around and give it a squeeze…”

To do that, you had to lift your arm even higher. Tears glazed your eyes, which made your sclera look electric. The cameraman zoomed in on your face, a close-up.

“Ow,” you said, starting to cry in earnest as your hand clutched the ring. “Please, Molly…can I stop?”

Suddenly Charlotte wasn’t sitting beside me anymore. She’d run to you, prized your fingers free. Tucking your arm close to your side, she cradled you. “It’s okay, baby,” she crooned. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry Molly made you try.”

At that, Molly’s head snapped around—but she kept her mouth shut when she saw the camera rolling.

Charlotte’s eyes were closed; she might have been crying, too. I felt like I was violating something private. So I reached over and put my hand on the long nose of the camera, gently forced it toward the floor.

The videographer cut the power.

Charlotte sat cross-legged with you curled in the bowl of her body. You looked embryonic, spent. I watched her stroke your hair and whisper to you as she stood, lifting you in her arms. Charlotte turned, so that she was facing us and you weren’t. “Did you get that on film?” she asked.

Once, I watched a news story about two couples whose newborns had been switched by accident at the hospital. They learned only years later, when one baby was found to have some god-awful hereditary disease that the parents didn’t have in their genetic makeup. The other family was tracked down and the mothers had to trade their sons. One mother—the one who was getting a healthy child back, as a matter of fact—was absolutely inconsolable. “He doesn’t feel right in my arms,” she kept sobbing. “He doesn’t smell like my boy.”

I wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for familiarity to set in. Maybe as long as it took a new car to lose that scent, or a brand-new house to gather dust. Maybe that was the process more commonly described as bonding: the act of learning your child as well as you know yourself.

But what if the child never knew the parent quite as well?

Like me, and my birth mother. Or you. Did you wonder why your mother had hired me? Why you were being followed around by a camera crew? Did you wonder, as we walked back to the classroom, whether your mother had brought you to tears on purpose, so that the jury would squirm?

Charlotte’s words kept ringing in my ears: I’m sorry Molly made you try. But Molly hadn’t. Charlotte had insisted on it. Had she been doing it because she truly cared about the range of motion in your right arm after your latest break? Or because she knew it would bring you to tears for the camera?

I was not a mother; I might never be. But I’d certainly had my share of friends who couldn’t stand their own mothers—either they were too absent or too smothering; they complained too much or they noticed too little. Part of growing up was distancing yourself from your mother.

It was different for me. I’d grown up with a tiny buffer of space between my adoptive mother and myself. Once, in chemistry, I’d learned that objects never really touch—because of ions repelling, there’s always an infinitesimal space, so that even when it feels like you’re holding hands or rubbing up against something on the atomic level, you’re not. That was how I felt these days about my adoptive family: to the naked eye, we looked like a seamless, happy group. But I knew that, no matter how hard I tried, I’d never close that microscopic gap.

Maybe this was normal. Maybe mothers—consciously or subconsciously—repelled their daughters in different ways. Some knew what they were doing—like my birth mother, handing me over to another family. And some, like Charlotte, didn’t. Her exploiting you on film for what she believed to be the greater good made me hate her, hate this case. I wanted to finish filming; I wanted to get as far away from her as possible before I did something that was forbidden in my line of work: tell her how I really felt about her and her lawsuit.

But just as I was trying to figure out a way to wrap this up early, I got what I’d been wishing for—a crisis. Not in the form of you falling down but, instead, equipment failure: while Charlotte was packing up your equipment after school, she saw that your wheelchair tire had gone dead flat.

“Willow,” she said, exasperated. “Didn’t you notice?”

“Do you have a spare?” I asked, wondering if there was a closet in the O’Keefe house that had extra parts for wheelchairs and braces, just as there was one full of splints, Ace bandages, slings, and doll plaster. “No,” Charlotte said. “But the bike store might.” She pulled out her cell phone and called Amelia. “I’m going to be a little late…No, she didn’t break. But her wheelchair did.”

The bike store didn’t have a size 22 wheel in stock, but they thought they might be able to order one in by the end of the week. “Which means,” Charlotte explained, “that either I can spend twice as much at a medical supply store in Boston or else Willow’s minus her chair for the rest of the week.”

An hour late, we pulled up to the middle school. Amelia was sitting on top of her backpack, glowering. “Just so you know,” she said, “I have three tests tomorrow.”

“Why didn’t you study while you were waiting for us?” you asked.

“Did I ask you for your opinion?”

By four o’clock I was exhausted. Charlotte was on the computer, trying to find discount wheelchair manufacturers online. Amelia was writing flash cards with French vocabulary on them. You were upstairs in your room, sitting on the floor with a pink ceramic pig on your lap.

“Sorry about your chair,” I said.

You shrugged. “Stuff like that happens a lot. Last time, the bike store had to get hair out from the front wheels because they stopped turning.”

“That’s pretty disgusting,” I said.

“Yeah…I guess it is.”

I settled down beside you as the videographer moved inconspicuously to a corner of the room. “You seem to have a lot of friends at school.”

“Not really. Most of the kids, they say stupid things like how lucky I am to get to ride in a wheelchair when they have to walk all the way down to the gym or around the playground or whatever.”

“But you don’t think it’s lucky.”

“No, because it’s only fun at first. It’s not so fun if you do it your whole life.” She looked up at me. “Those kids today? They’re not my friends.”

“They all wanted to sit next to you at snack—”

“What they wanted was to be in the movie.” You shook the ceramic pig in your lap. It jingled. “Did you know real pigs think, like we do? And they can learn tricks like dogs, only faster.”

“That’s impressive. Are you saving up to buy one?”

“No,” you said. “I’m giving my allowance money to my mother, so she can buy the tire for my wheelchair and not have to worry about how much it costs.” You pulled the black plug from between the pig’s legs, and a trickle of dimes and nickels, with the occasional wadded dollar, tumbled out. “Last time I counted I had seven dollars and sixteen cents.”

“Willow,” I said slowly. “Your mother didn’t ask you to pay for that wheel.”

“No, but if it doesn’t cost her any extra, she won’t have to get rid of me.”

I was struck silent. “Willow,” I said, “you know your mother loves you.”

You looked up at me.

“Sometimes, mothers say and do things that seem like they don’t want their kids…but when you look more closely, you realize that they’re doing those kids a favor. They’re just trying to give them a better life. Do you understand?”

“I guess.” You tipped over the piggy bank again. It sounded as if it were full of broken glass.

“Can I talk to you?” I said as I walked into the study where Charlotte was poring over the results of a search engine.

She jumped up. “I’m sorry. I know. You didn’t come here to film me surfing the Net for wheelchair tire patch kits.”

I closed the door behind me. “Forget about the camera, Charlotte. I was just upstairs with Willow, counting her piggy bank savings. She wants to give it to you. She’s trying to buy her way into your good graces.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Charlotte said.

“Why? What great leap of logic would you make if you were six years old and you knew that your mother had filed a lawsuit because something was wrong when you were born?”

“Aren’t you my lawyer?” Charlotte said. “Aren’t you supposed to be helping me instead of telling me I’m a rotten mother?”

“I am trying to help you. I don’t know how the hell I’m going to cobble together a video for the jury from this footage, to be honest. Because right now, if they saw it, they might feel sorry for Willow—but they’d hate you.”

Suddenly all of the fight went out of Charlotte. She sank back into the chair she’d been sitting on when I came into the room. “When you first mentioned wrongful birth, I felt like Sean did. Like it was the most disgusting term I’d ever heard in my life. All these years I’ve just gone along doing what needed to be done. I knew people watched me with Willow and thought, That poor girl. That poor mother. But you know, I never really pictured it that way. She was my baby and I was going to take care of her, and that was that.” Charlotte looked up at me. “Then, you and Robert Ramirez started talking, asking me questions. And I thought, Someone gets it. It felt like I’d been living underground, and for a moment, I’d been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you’ve seen that, how can you go back where you came from?”

I felt my cheeks burn. I knew exactly what Charlotte was talking about, and I did not like thinking I had anything in common with her. But I remembered the day when I’d been told I was adopted, when I realized there was another mother, another father out there somewhere I had never met. For years, even when it wasn’t in the forefront of my mind, it was still present, an itch just beneath the skin.

Lawyers were notorious for finding cases in the most unlikely places, especially ones with huge potential damages awards. But was the dissolution of this family really my fault? Had Bob and I created a monster?

“My mother’s in a nursing home now,” Charlotte said. “She can’t remember who I am, so I’ve become the keeper of the memories. I’m the one who tells her about the time she baked brownies for the entire senior class when I ran for student council, and how I won by a landslide. Or how she used to collect sea glass with me during the summer and put it in a jar next to my bed. I wonder what memories Willow will have to tell me, if it comes to that. I wonder if there’s a difference between being a dutiful mother and being a good mother.”

“There is,” I said, and Charlotte looked up at me, expectant.

Even if I couldn’t articulate the difference as an adult, as a child, I had felt it. I thought for a moment. “A dutiful mother is someone who follows every step her child makes,” I said.

“And a good mother?”

I lifted my gaze to Charlotte’s. “Is someone whose child wants to follow her.”

Interfering Agents: A substance added to sugar syrup in order to prevent it from crystallizing.

We’ve all had a crystallizing moment, when suddenly everything begins to come together…whether we want it to or not. The same thing happens in the production of candy—there’s a time when the mixture starts to turn into something it wasn’t moments before. A single unincorporated sugar crystal can change the texture from smooth to grainy, and eventually, if you don’t prevent it, you get rock candy. But ingredients added to sugar syrup before boiling can keep that moment of crystallization from occurring. Common interfering agents are corn syrup, glucose, and honey; cream of tartar, lemon juice, or vinegar.

If it’s not candy you’re trying to prevent from becoming crystal clear—but, instead, your life—well, the best interfering agent is always a lie well told.

CRÈME CARAMEL

CARAMEL

1 cup sugar

1/3 cup water

2 tablespoons light corn syrup

¼ teaspoon lemon juice

CUSTARD

1½ cups whole milk

1½ cups light whipping cream

3 large eggs

2 large egg yolks

2/3 cup sugar

1½ teaspoons vanilla extract

Pinch of salt

You can make one large crème caramel, but I like to make individual ones in ramekins. To make the caramel, mix the sugar, water, corn syrup, and lemon juice in a medium nonreactive saucepan (a light-colored one, so you can see the color of the syrup). Simmer over medium-high heat, wiping the sides of the pan with a wet cloth to make sure there are no sugar crystals lurking that might cause crystallization. Cook for about 8 minutes, until the syrup turns from clear to gold, swirling the pan to make sure browning occurs evenly. Continue to cook for another 4 to 5 minutes, swirling the pan constantly, until large bubbles on the mixture’s surface turn honey-colored. Remove the pan immediately from the heat and pour a portion of the caramel into each of eight ungreased 5-or 6-ounce ovenproof ramekins. Allow the caramel to cool and harden, about 15 minutes. (Ramekins can be covered with plastic wrap and refrigerated for up to two days, but return them to room temperature before you move on to the next step.)

To make the custard, heat the milk and cream in a medium saucepan over medium heat, stirring occasionally until a thermometer in the liquid reads 160 degrees F. Remove the mixture from the heat. Meanwhile, whisk the eggs, yolks, and sugar in a large bowl until just combined. Whisk the warm milk mixture, vanilla, and salt into the egg mixture until just mixed but not foamy. Strain the mixture through a mesh sieve into a large measuring cup and set it aside.

Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil. Meanwhile, fold a dish towel to fit the bottom of a large roasting pan. Divide the reserved custard mixture among the ramekins and place the filled ramekins in the pan, making sure they do not touch. Set the pan on the center rack of a preheated 350 degree F oven. Fill the pan with boiling water to reach halfway up the ramekins and cover the entire pan loosely with aluminum foil, so that steam can escape. Bake 35 to 40 minutes, until a paring knife inserted halfway between the center and edge of the custard comes out clean.

Transfer the custards to a wire rack and cool to room temperature. To unmold, slide a paring knife around the outer edge of each custard, hold a serving plate over the top of the ramekin, invert, and shake gently to release the custard. Serve immediately.

Charlotte

August 2008

The 2008 Biennial Osteogenesis Imperfecta Convention was being held in Omaha, at a huge Hilton with a conference center, a big pool, and over 570 people who looked like you. As we walked into the registration area, I suddenly felt like a giant, and you turned to me from your wheelchair with the biggest smile on your face. “Mom,” you said, “I’m normal here.”

We’d never been to a conference before. We’d never been able to find the money to come to one. But Sean had not slept at our house in months—and although you hadn’t asked why, it had less to do with you not noticing than with you not wanting to hear the answer. Frankly, neither did I. Sean and I had not used the word separation, but just because you didn’t put a name to something did not mean it wasn’t there. Sometimes, I caught myself wondering what Sean would like for dinner, or picking up the phone to call his cell before I remembered not to. Your face lit up when he came to visit you; I wanted to give you something else to look forward to. So when the flyer for this conference came via email from the OI Foundation, I knew that I’d found the perfect prize.

Now, as I watched you eyeing a phalanx of girls your age roll by in their own wheelchairs, I realized we should have done this earlier. Even Amelia wasn’t making any sarcastic remarks—just taking in the small groups of people in wheelchairs, walkers, or on their own two feet, greeting each other like long-lost relatives. There were preteen girls—some who looked like Amelia, others who were short of stature, like you—taking pictures of each other with disposable cameras. Boys the same age were terrorizing the escalators, teaching each other how to ride their wheelchairs up and down them.

A little girl with black ringlets walked up to you, her braces jingling. “You’re new,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Willow.”

“I’m Niamh. It’s a weird name because there’s no v but it sounds like there is. You’ve got a weird name, too.” She looked up at Amelia. “Is this your sister? Does she have OI?”

“No.”

“Huh,” Niamh said. “Well, that’s too bad for her. The coolest programs are for kids like us.”

There were forty information sessions over a three-day weekend—everything from “Financial Planning for Your Special-Needs Child” to “Writing the IEP” and “Ask a Doctor.” You had your own Kids’ Club events—arts and crafts, scavenger hunts, swimming, video game competitions, how to be more independent, how to improve your self-esteem. I hadn’t been too keen on giving you up for a day’s activities, but they were staffed by nurses. Preteens with OI had Game Night, and The Adventures of Bone Boy and Milk Maid. Even Amelia could attend special talks for non-OI siblings.

“Niamh, there you are!” A teenage girl who looked about Amelia’s age came closer with a pack of kids trailing behind her. “You can’t just run off,” she said, grasping Niamh’s hand. “Who’s your friend?”

“Willow.”

The older girl crouched down so that she was eye level with you in your chair. “Nice to meet you, Willow. We’re just across the lobby over there playing Spit if you want to join us.”