Folding: a gentle process in which one mixture is added to another, using a large metal spoon or spatula.

Most of the time when you talk about folding, it involves an edge. You fold laundry, you fold notes in half. With batter, it’s different: you bring two diverse substances together, but that space between them doesn’t completely disappear—a mixture that’s been folded the right way is light, airy, the parts still getting to know each other.

It’s a combination on the cusp, as one mixture yields to the other. Think of a bad hand of poker, of an argument, of any situation where one party simply gives in.

CHOCOLATE RASPBERRY SOUFFLÉ

1 pint raspberries, pureed and strained

8 eggs, separated

4 ounces sugar

3 ounces all-purpose flour

8 ounces good-quality bittersweet chocolate, chopped

2 ounces Chambord liqueur

2 tablespoons melted butter

Sugar for dusting ramekins

Heat the raspberry puree to lukewarm in a heavy saucepan. Whisk the egg yolks with 3 ounces of sugar in large mixing bowl; whisk in the flour and raspberry puree, and return the mixture to the saucepan.

Cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until the custard is thick. Do not allow it to boil. Remove from heat, and stir in the chocolate until it is completely melted. Mix in the liqueur. Cover the base mixture with plastic to prevent a skin from forming.

Meanwhile, butter six ramekins and dust with sugar. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.

Whip the egg whites to stiff peaks with the remaining ounce of sugar. And here is the part where you will see it—the coming together of two very different mixtures—as you fold the egg whites into the chocolate. Neither one will be willing to give up its substance: the darkness of the chocolate will become part of the foam of the egg whites, and vice versa.

Spoon the mixture into the ramekins, just 1/4 inch shy of the rim. Bake immediately. The soufflés are done when they are well risen, golden brown on top, with edges that appear dry—about 20 minutes. But do not be surprised if, when you remove them from the oven, they sink under the weight of their own promise.

Charlotte

April 2007

You can’t live a life without impact. It was one of the first things doctors told us when they began explaining the catch-22 that was osteogenesis imperfecta: be active, but don’t break, because if you break, you can’t be active. The parents who kept their kids sedentary, or had them walk on their knees so that they would be less likely to fall and suffer a fracture, also ran the risk of never having their children’s muscles and joints develop enough to protect the bones.

Sean was the risk taker when it came to you. Then again, he wasn’t the one who was home most often when you had a break. But he’d spent years convincing me that a few casts was small price to pay for a real life; maybe now I could convince him that two silly words like wrongful birth meant nothing when compared to the future they might secure for you. In spite of Sean’s exit from the lawyer’s office, I kept hoping they might call me again. I fell asleep thinking about what Robert Ramirez had said. I woke up with an unfamiliar taste in my mouth, part sweet and part sour; it took me days to realize this was simply hope.

You were sitting in a hospital bed with a blanket thrown over your spica cast, reading a trivia book while we waited for your pamidronate infusion. At first, you’d come in every two months; now we only had to make biannual treks down to Boston. Pamidronate wasn’t a cure for OI, just a treatment—one that made it possible for Type IIIs like you to walk at all, instead of being wheelchair-bound. Before this, even stepping down could cause microfractures in your feet.

“You wouldn’t believe it, looking at her femur breaks, but her Z score’s much better,” Dr. Rosenblad said. “She’s at minus three.”

When you were born and had a Dexascan reading for bone density, your score was minus six. Ninety-eight percent of the population fell between plus and minus two. Bone constantly makes new bone and absorbs old bone; pamidronate slowed down the rate at which your body would absorb the bone; it allowed you to move enough to build up strength in your bones. Once, Dr. Rosenblad had explained it to me by holding up a kitchen sponge: bone was porous, the pamidronate filled in the holes a little.

You’d had over fifty fractures in five years with the treatment; I couldn’t imagine what life would have been like without it.

“I’ve got a good fact for you today, Willow,” Dr. Rosenblad said. “In a pinch, if you need a substitute for blood plasma, you can use the goop inside coconuts.”

Your eyes widened. “Have you ever done that?”

“I was thinking of trying it today…” He grinned at you. “Just joking. Got any questions for me before we get the show on the road?”

You slipped your hand into mine. “Two sticks, right?”

“That’s the rule,” I said. If a nurse couldn’t get the IV inserted in your vein in two tries, I’d make her get someone else to do it.

It’s funny—when I went out with Sean and another cop and his wife, I was the shy one. I was never the life of the party; I didn’t strike up conversations with people standing in the grocery line behind me. But put me in a hospital setting, and I would fight to the death for you. I would be your voice, until you learned to speak up for yourself. I had not always been like this—who doesn’t want to believe a doctor knows best? But there are practitioners who can go an entire career without ever running across a case of OI. The fact that people told me they knew what they were doing did not mean I would trust them.

Except Piper. I had believed her when she told me that there was no way we could have known any sooner that you would be born this way.

“I think we’re good to go,” Dr. Rosenblad said.

The treatments were four hours each, for three days in a row. After two hours of multiple nurses and residents coming in to get your vitals (honestly, did they think that your weight and height changed in the span of a half hour?), Dr. Rosenblad would be called in, and then you’d give a urine sample. After that came the blood draw—six vials while you clutched my hand so hard you left tiny half-moons with your fingernails on the canvas of my skin. Finally, the nurse would administer the IV—the part you resisted the most. As soon as I heard her footsteps in the hall, I tried to distract you by pointing out facts in your book.

Flamingo tongues were eaten in ancient Rome as a delicacy.

In Kentucky, it’s illegal to carry ice cream in your back pocket.

“Hey, sugar,” the nurse said. She had a cloud of unnaturally yellow hair and wore a stethoscope with a monkey clipped to the side of it. She was carrying a small plastic tray with an IV needle, alcohol wipes, and two strips of white tape.

“Needles suck,” you said.

“Willow! Watch your language!”

“But suck isn’t a swear word. Vacuums suck.”

“Especially if you’re the one doing the housecleaning,” the nurse murmured, swabbing your arm. “Now, Willow, I’m going to count to three before I stick you. Ready? One…two!”

“Three,” you yelped. “You lied!”

“Sometimes it’s easier to not be expecting it,” the nurse said, but she was lifting the needle again. “That wasn’t a good one. Let’s give it another try—”

“No,” I interrupted. “Is there another nurse on the floor who can do this?”

“I’ve been putting in IVs for thirteen years—”

“But not in my daughter.”

Her face frosted over. “I’ll get my supervisor.”

She closed the door behind us. “But that was only the first stick,” you said.

I sank down beside you on the bed. “She was sneaky. I’m not taking any chances.”

Your fingers ruffled the pages of your book, as if you were reading Braille. One factoid jumped out at me: The safest year of life, statistically, is age ten.

You were halfway there.

The nice part about your being kept overnight in the hospital was that I didn’t have to worry whether you’d wind up there, courtesy of a slip in the tub or an arm hooked on the sleeve of your jacket. As soon as they had finished the first infusion and flushed the IV and you were sleeping deeply, I crept out of the darkened room and went to the bank of pay phones near the elevators so that I could call home.

“How is she?” Sean asked as soon as he picked up the phone.

“Bored. Fidgety. The usual. How’s Amelia?”

“She got an A on her math quiz and threw a fit when I told her she had to wash the dishes after dinner.”

I smiled. “The usual,” I repeated.

“Guess what we had for dinner?” Sean said. “Chicken cordon bleu, roasted potatoes, and stir-fried green beans.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “You can’t even boil an egg.”

“I didn’t say I cooked. The take-out counter at the grocery store was just particularly well stocked tonight.”

“Well, Willow and I had a culinary feast of tapioca pudding, chicken noodle soup, and red Jell-O.”

“I want to call her before I go to work tomorrow. What time will she get up?”

“Six, for the nurses’ shift change,” I said.

“I’ll set my alarm,” Sean answered.

“By the way, Dr. Rosenblad asked me about doing the surgery again.”

This was—no pun intended—a bone of contention for Sean and me. Your orthopedic surgeon wanted to rod your femurs after you were out of your spica cast, so that, even if there were future breaks, they wouldn’t displace. Rodding also prevented bowing, since OI bone grows spirally. As Dr. Rosenblad said, it was the best way to manage OI, since you can’t cure OI. But although I was gung ho about doing anything and everything that might save you some pain in the future, Sean looked at the here and now—and the fact that a surgery meant you’d be incapacitated once again. I could practically hear him digging in his heels. “Didn’t you print out some article about how rodding stunts growth in OI kids—”

“You’re thinking of the spinal rods,” I said. “Once they put them in to combat the scoliosis, Willow won’t get any taller. This is different. Dr. Rosenblad even said the rods have gotten so sophisticated, they’ll grow with her—they telescope out.”

“What if she doesn’t have any more femur breaks? Then she’s having the surgery for nothing.”

The chances of you not having another leg break were about as good as those of the sun not rising tomorrow morning. That was the other difference between Sean and me—I was the resident pessimist. “Do you really want to have to deal with another spica cast? If she winds up in one when she’s seven or ten or twelve, who’s going to be able to lift her then?”

Sean sighed. “She’s a kid, Charlotte. Shouldn’t she be able to run around for a while before you take that away again?”

“I’m not taking anything away,” I said, stung. “The fact is, she’s going to fall. The fact is, she’s going to break. Don’t cast me as the villain, Sean, just because I’m trying to help her in the long run.”

There was a hesitation. “I know how hard it is,” he said. “I know how much you do for her.”

It was as close as he could come to alluding to the disastrous visit in the lawyer’s office. “I wasn’t complaining—”

“I never said you were. I’m just saying…we knew it wouldn’t be easy, right?”

Yes, we’d known that. But I guess I also hadn’t realized it would ever be quite this hard. “I have to go,” I said, and when Sean said he loved me, I pretended I had not heard.

I hung up and immediately dialed Piper. “What’s wrong with men?” I asked.

In the background, I could hear the water running, dishes clattering in the sink. “Is that a rhetorical question?” she said.

“Sean doesn’t want Willow to have rodding surgery.”

“Hang on. Aren’t you in Boston for pamidronate?”

“Yes, and Rosenblad brought it up today when we saw him,” I said. “He’s been urging us to do it for a year now, and Sean keeps putting it off, and Willow keeps breaking.”

“Even though she’ll be better off in the long run?”

“Even though.”

“Well,” Piper said, “then I have one word for you: Lysistrata.”

I burst out laughing. “I’ve been sleeping with Willow on the living room couch for the past month. If I told Sean I was going to stop having sex with him, it would be a pretty empty threat.”

“There’s your answer, then,” Piper said. “Bring on the candles, oysters, negligee, the whole nine yards…and when he’s blissed out in a hedonistic coma, ask him again.” I heard a voice in the background. “Rob says that’ll work like a charm.”

“Thank him for the vote of confidence.”

“Hey, by the way, tell Willow that a person’s thumb is as long as his nose.”

“Really?” I wedged my hand up to my face to check. “She’ll love that.”

“Oh, shoot, that’s my call waiting. Why can’t babies get born at nine in the morning?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?” I said.

“And we come full circle. Talk to you tomorrow, Char.”

After I hung up, I stared at the receiver for a long moment. She’ll be better off in the long run, Piper had said.

Did she believe that, unconditionally? Not just about a rodding surgery but about any action that a good mother would undertake?

I didn’t know if I could even muster the courage to sue for wrongful birth. Saying abstractly that there were some children who shouldn’t be born was hard enough, but this went one step further. This meant saying one particular child—my child—shouldn’t have been born. What kind of mother would face a judge and a jury, and announce that she wished her child had never existed?

Either the kind of mother who didn’t love her daughter at all…or the kind of mother who loved her daughter too much. The kind of mother who would say anything and everything if it meant you’d have a better life.

But even if I came to terms with that moral conundrum, the additional wrinkle here was that the person on the other end of the lawsuit was not a stranger—she was my best friend.

I thought of the foam pad we had once used to line your car bed and your crib, how sometimes, when I lifted you out of it, I could still see the impression you’d made, like a memory, or a ghost. And then, like magic, it would disappear. The indelible mark I’d left on Piper, the indelible mark she’d left on me—well, maybe they weren’t permanent. For years, I’d believed Piper when she said tests wouldn’t have told us any earlier that you had OI, but she had been talking about blood tests. She’d never even alluded to the fact that other prenatal testing—like ultrasounds—might have picked up your OI. Had she been making excuses for me, or for herself?

It won’t affect her, a voice in my head murmured. That’s what malpractice insurance is for. But it would affect us. In order to make sure you could rely on me, I would lose the friend I’d relied on since before you were born.

Last year, when Emma and Amelia were in sixth grade, the gym teacher had come up behind Emma and squeezed her shoulders while she waited on the sidelines of a softball game. Innocuous, most likely, but Emma had come home saying that it creeped her out. What do I do? Piper had asked me. Give him the benefit of the doubt, or be a helicopter parent? Before I could even offer her my opinion, she’d made up her mind. It’s my daughter, she said. If I don’t go in and open up my mouth, I may live to regret it.

I loved Piper Reece. But I would always love you more.

With my heart pounding, I took a business card out of my back pocket and dialed the number before I could lose my nerve.

“Marin Gates,” said a voice on the other end.

“Oh,” I stumbled, surprised. I had been anticipating an answering machine this late at night. “I wasn’t expecting you to be there…”

“Who is this?”

“Charlotte O’Keefe. I was in your office a couple of weeks ago with my husband about—”

“Yes, I remember,” Marin said.

I twisted the metal snake of the phone cord around my arm, imagined the words I would funnel into it, send into the world, make real.

“Mrs. O’Keefe?”

“I’m interested in…taking legal action.”

There was a brief silence. “Why don’t we schedule a time for you to come in and meet with me? I can have my secretary call you tomorrow.”

“No,” I said, and then shook my head. “I mean, that’s fine, but I won’t be home tomorrow. I’m in the hospital with Willow.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“No, she’s fine. Well, she’s not fine, but this is routine. We’ll be home Thursday.”

“I’ll make a note.”

“Good,” I said, my breath coming in a rush. “Good.”

“Give my best to your family,” Marin replied.

“I’ve just got one question,” I said, but she had already hung up the phone. I pressed the mouthpiece against my lips, tasted the bitter metal. “Would you do this?” I whispered out loud. “Would you do this, if you were me?”

If you’d like to make a call, said the mechanical voice of an operator, please hang up and try again.

What would Sean say?

Nothing, I realized, because I wouldn’t tell him what I’d done.

I walked back down the hall toward your room. On the bed, you were snoring softly. The video you’d been watching when you fell asleep cast a reflection over your bed in reds and greens and golds, an early rush of autumn. I lay down on the narrow cot that had been converted from one of the guest chairs by a helpful nurse; she’d left me a threadbare blanket and a pillow that crackled like polar ice.

The mural on the far wall was an ancient map, with a pirate ship sailing off its borders. Not long ago, sailors believed that the seas were precipitous, that compasses could point out the spots where, beyond, there’d be dragons. I wondered about the explorers who’d sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.

Piper

I met Charlotte eight years ago, in one of the coldest rinks in New Hampshire, when we were dressing our four-year-old daughters as shooting stars for a forty-five-second performance in the club’s winter skating show. I was waiting for Emma to finish lacing up her skates while other mothers effortlessly yanked their daughters’ hair into buns and tied the ribbons of the shimmering costumes around their wrists and ankles. They chatted about the Christmas wrapping paper sale the skating club was doing for fund-raising and complained about their husbands, who hadn’t charged the video camera batteries long enough. In contrast to this offhanded competence, Charlotte sat alone, off to one side, trying to coax a very stubborn Amelia into tying back her long hair. “Amelia,” she said, “your teacher won’t let you onto the ice like that. Everyone has to match.”

She looked familiar, although I didn’t remember meeting her. I thrust a few bobby pins at Charlotte and smiled. “If you need them,” I said, “I also have superglue and marine varnish. This isn’t our first year with the Nazi Skating Club.”

Charlotte burst out laughing and took the pins. “They’re four years old!”

“Apparently, if you don’t start young, they’ll have nothing to talk about in therapy,” I joked. “I’m Piper, by the way. Proudly defiant skating parent.”

She held out a hand. “Charlotte.”

“Mom,” Emma said, “that’s Amelia. I told you about her last week. She just moved here.”

“We came because of work,” Charlotte said.

“For you or your husband?”

“I’m not married,” she said. “I’m the new pastry chef over at Capers.”

“That’s where I know you from. I read about you in that magazine article.”

Charlotte blushed. “Don’t believe everything in print…”

“You ought to be proud! Me, I can’t even bake a Betty Crocker mix without screwing it up. Luckily, that’s not part of my job description.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m an obstetrician.”

“Well, that beats what I do, hands down,” Charlotte said. “When I deliver, people gain weight. When you deliver, they lose it.”

Emma poked a finger into a hole in her costume. “Mine’s going to fall off because you don’t know how to sew,” she accused.

“It won’t fall off,” I sighed, then turned to Charlotte. “I was too busy suturing to sew a costume, so I hot-glued the seams.”

“Next time,” Charlotte told Emma, “I’ll sew yours when I do Amelia’s.”

I liked that—the idea that she was already counting on us being friends. We were destined to be partners in crime, subversive parents who didn’t care what the establishment thought. Just then, the teacher stuck her head inside the locker room door. “Amelia? Emma?” she snapped. “We’re all waiting for you out here!”

“Girls, you’d better hurry. You heard what Eva Braun said.”

Emma scowled. “Mommy, her name’s Miss Helen.”

Charlotte laughed. “Break a leg!” she said as they hurried into the rink. “Or does that only work if the stage isn’t made of ice?”

I don’t know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination, but I have thought back to that moment, to Charlotte’s good-luck phrase, many times. Do I remember it because of the way you were born? Or were you born because of the way I remember it?

Rob was braced over me, his leg moving between mine as he kissed me. “We can’t,” I whispered. “Emma’s still awake.”

“She won’t come in here…”

“You don’t know that—”

Rob buried his face in my neck. “She knows we have sex. If we didn’t, she wouldn’t be here.”

“Do you like to imagine your parents having sex?”

Grimacing, Rob rolled away from me. “Okay, that effectively killed the mood.”

I laughed. “Give her ten minutes to fall asleep and I’ll get the fire going again.”

He pillowed his head on his arms, staring up at the ceiling. “How many times a week do you think Charlotte and Sean do it?”

“I don’t know!”

Rob glanced at me. “Sure you do. Girls talk about that kind of thing.”

“Okay, first of all, no we don’t. And second of all, even if we did, I don’t sit around wondering how often my best friend has sex with her husband.”

“Yeah, right,” Rob said. “So you’ve never looked at Sean and wondered what it would be like to sleep with him?”

I came up on an elbow. “Have you?”

He grinned. “Sean’s not my type…”

“Very funny.” My gaze slid toward him. “Charlotte? Really?”

“Well…you know…it’s just a curiosity. Even Gordon Ramsay’s got to think about Big Macs once or twice in passing.”

“So I’m the high-maintenance gourmet meal and Charlotte’s fast food?”

“It was a bad metaphor,” Rob admitted.

Sean O’Keefe was tall, strong, physically fierce—orthogonal to Rob’s slight runner’s frame, his careful surgeon’s hands, his addiction to reading. One of the reasons I’d fallen for Rob was that he seemed to be more impressed with my mind than with my legs. If I’d ever considered what it would be like to roll around with someone like Sean, the impulse must have been quickly squashed: after all these years, and all these conversations with Charlotte, I knew him too well to find him attractive.

But Sean’s intensity also carried over into his parenting—he was crazy about his little girls; he was deeply private and protective of Charlotte. Rob was cerebral, not visceral. What would it feel like to have so much raw passion focused on you at once? I tried to picture Sean in bed. Did he wear pajama pants, like Rob? Or go commando?

“Huh,” Rob said. “I didn’t know you could blush way down to your—”

I yanked the sheets up to my chin. “To answer your question,” I said, “I’m not even sure it’s once a week. Between Willow and Sean’s work schedule, they’re probably not even in the same room at night most of the time.”

It was odd, I realized, that Charlotte and I had not discussed sex. Not because I was her friend but because I was her doctor—part of my medical questioning involved whether or not a patient was having any problems during intercourse. Had I asked her that? Or had I skipped over it because it seemed too personal to ask that of a friend instead of a stranger? Back then, sex was a means to an end: a baby. But what about now? Was Charlotte happy? Did she and Sean lie in bed, comparing themselves to me and Rob?

“Well, go figure. You and I are in the same room at night.” Rob leaned over me. “How about we maximize that potential?”

“Emma—”

“Is lost in her dreams by now.” Rob pulled my pajama top over my head and stared at me. “As a matter of fact, so am I…”

I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him slowly. “Still thinking about Charlotte?”

“Charlotte who?” Rob murmured, and he kissed me back.

Once a month, Charlotte and I went to a movie and then to a seedy bar called Maxie’s Pad—a place whose name absolutely cracked me up, given the gynecological connotation, although I’m quite sure that was lost on Maxie himself, a grizzled old Maine fisherman who, when we first ordered Chardonnay, had told us it wasn’t on tap. Even when the only films playing were really awful slasher flicks or teen comedies, I’d drag Charlotte out for the night. If I didn’t, there were stretches of time when she’d never have left the house.

The best thing about Maxie’s was his grandson, Moose, a linebacker who’d been kicked out of college in the middle of a cheating scandal. He’d started bartending for his grandpa three years ago, when he was back home evaluating his options, and he’d never left. He was six-six, blond, brawny, and had the mental acuity of a spatula.

“Here you go, ma’am,” Moose said, sliding a pale ale toward Charlotte, who barely even flicked a glance at him.

There was something wrong with Charlotte tonight. She’d tried to back out of our standing date, but I wouldn’t allow it, and for the past few hours she’d been distant and distracted. I attributed it to concern over you—with the pamidronate treatment and the femur breaks and the rodding surgery, she had plenty on her mind—and I was determined to divert her attention. “He winked at you,” I announced as soon as Moose turned away to help another customer.

“Oh, get out,” Charlotte said. “I’m too old to be flirted with.”

“Forty-four is the new twenty-two.”

“Yeah, well, talk to me when you’re my age.”

“Charlotte, I’m only two years younger than you!” I laughed and took a sip of my own beer. “God, we’re pathetic. He’s probably thinking, Those poor middle-aged women; the least I can do is make their day by pretending I find them even remotely sexy.”

Charlotte lifted her mug. “Here’s to not being married to a guy too young to rent a car from Hertz.”

I was the one who’d introduced your mother and your father. I think it’s human nature that those of us who are married cannot rest easy until we find mates for our single friends. Charlotte had never been married—Amelia’s father had been a drug addict who’d tried to clean up his act during Charlotte’s pregnancy, failed miserably, and moved to India with a seventeen-year-old pole dancer. So when I was pulled over for speeding by a really good-looking cop who wasn’t wearing a wedding band, I invited him to dinner so that he could meet Charlotte.

“I don’t do blind dates,” your mother told me.

“Then Google him.”

Ten minutes later she called me, frantic, because Sean O’Keefe was also the name of a recently paroled child molester. Ten months later, she married the other Sean O’Keefe.

I watched Moose stack glasses behind the bar, the light playing over his muscles. “So how goes it with Sean?” I asked. “Have you managed to convince him to do it yet?”

Charlotte startled, nearly knocking over her beer. “To do what?”

“The rodding surgery for Willow. Hello?”

“Right,” Charlotte said. “I forgot I’d told you about that.”

“Charlotte, we talk every day.” I looked at her more carefully. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I just need a good night’s sleep,” she replied, but she was looking down into her beer, running one finger along the rim of the glass until it sang to us. “You know, I was reading something at the hospital, some magazine. There was an article in there about a family who sued the hospital after their son was born with cystic fibrosis.”

I shook my head. “That pass-the-buck mentality drives me crazy. Pin the blame on someone else to make yourself feel better.”

“Maybe someone else really was at fault.”

“It’s the luck of the draw. You know what an obstetrician would say if a couple had a newborn with CF? ‘Oh, they got a bad baby.’ It’s not a judgment call, it’s just a statement of fact.”

“A bad baby,” Charlotte repeated. “Is that what you think happened to me?”

Sometimes, I let myself run on without thinking—like right now, when I remembered too late that Charlotte’s interest in this subject was more than theoretical. I felt heat flood my face. “I wasn’t talking about Willow. She’s—”

“Perfect?” Charlotte challenged.

But you were. You did the funniest Paris Hilton impression I’d ever seen; you could sing the alphabet backward; your features were delicate, elfin, fairy-tale. Those brittle bones were the least important part of you.

Suddenly Charlotte folded. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No, honestly, my mouth shouldn’t be able to function unless my brain’s engaged.”

“I’m just exhausted,” Charlotte said. “I ought to call it a night.” When I started to get up off my stool, she shook her head. “Stay here, finish your beer.”

“Let me walk you out to the car—”

“I’m a big girl, Piper. Really. Just forget I even said anything.”

I nodded. And, stupid me, I did.

Amelia

So there I was in the school library, one of the few places where I could pretend my life wasn’t totally ruled by your OI, when I stumbled across it: a photograph in a magazine of a woman who looked just like you. It was weird, like one of those FBI photos where they artificially age a kid who’s been kidnapped ten years, so that you might be able to recognize him on the street. There was your flyaway silk hair, your pointy chin, your bowed legs. I’d met other OI kids before and knew you all had similar features, but this was really ridiculous.

Even more weird was the fact that this lady was holding a baby, and was standing next to a giant. He had his arm around her and was grinning out of the photo with a really heinous overbite.

“Alma Dukins,” the text below it read, “is only 3'2''; her husband, Grady, is 6'4''.”

“Whatcha doing?” Emma said.

She was my best friend; we’d been best friends for, like, ever. After the whole Disney nightmare, when kids in school found out I’d been shipped off to a foster home overnight, she (a) didn’t treat me like a leper, and (b) threatened to deck anyone who did. Right now, she’d come up behind my chair and notched her chin over my shoulder. “Hey, that woman looks like your sister.”

I nodded. “She’s got OI, too. Maybe Wills was switched at birth.”

Emma sank into the empty chair beside me. “Is that her husband? My dad could totally fix his teeth.” She peered at the magazine. “God, how do they even do it?”

“That’s disgusting,” I said, although I had been wondering the same thing.

Emma blew a bubble with her gum. “I guess everyone’s the same height when you’re lying down doing the nasty,” she said. “I thought Willow couldn’t have kids.”

I kind of thought that, too. I guess no one had ever really discussed it with you, because you were only five, and believe me I didn’t want to think about anything as repulsive as this, but if you could break a bone coughing, how would you ever get a baby out of you, or a you-know-what in?

I knew if I wanted rugrats, I’d be able to have them one day. If you wanted kids, though, it wouldn’t be easy, even if it was possible. It wasn’t fair, but then again, what was when it came to you?

You couldn’t skate. You couldn’t bike. You couldn’t ski. And even when you did play a game that was physical—like hide-and-seek—Mom used to insist that you get an extra count of twenty. I pretended to be bent out of shape by this so you wouldn’t feel like you were getting special treatment, but deep down I knew it was the right thing to do—you couldn’t get around as fast as I could, with your braces or crutches or wheelchair, and it took you longer to wiggle into a hiding spot. Amelia, wait up! you always said when we were walking somewhere, and I would, because I knew there were a million other ways I would leave you behind.

I would grow up, while you’d stay the size of a toddler.

I would go to college, move away from home, and not have to worry about things like whether I could reach the gas pump or the buttons on the ATM.

I’d maybe find a guy who didn’t think I was a total loser and get married and have kids and be able to carry them around without worrying that I’d get microfractures in my spine.

I read the finer print of the magazine article.

Alma Dukins, 34, gave birth on March 5, 2008, to a healthy baby girl. Dukins, who has osteogenesis imperfecta Type III, is 3'2'' tall and weighed 39 pounds before her pregnancy. She gained 19 pounds during her pregnancy and her daughter, Lulu, was delivered by C-section at 32 weeks, when Alma’s small body could not accommodate the enlarging uterus. She weighed four pounds, six ounces, and was 16½ inches long at birth.

You were at the stage when you played with dolls. Mom said I used to do that, too, although I only remember dismembering mine and cutting off all their hair. Sometimes I would catch Mom watching you wrap your fake baby’s arm in a cast, and it was like a storm cloud passed over her face—she was probably thinking that chances were you’d never have a real baby, mixed with feeling relief that you wouldn’t have to know what it was like to watch your own kid break a million bones, like she did.

But in spite of what my mother thought, here was proof that someone with OI could have a family. This Alma woman was Type III, like you. She didn’t walk like you could—she was wheelchair-bound. And yet she’d managed to find a husband, goofy smile and all, and have a baby of her own.

“You ought to show Willow,” Emma said. “Just take it. Who’s going to know?”

So I checked to see if the librarian was still on her computer, ordering clothes from Gap.com (we’d done our share of spying on her), and then I faked a coughing fit. I doubled over and tucked the magazine inside my jacket. I smiled weakly as the librarian glanced at me to make sure I wasn’t hacking out a lung on the floor or anything.

Emma expected me to keep the magazine for you, to show you or even Mom that one day you could grow up and get married and have a kid. But I had stolen it for a completely different reason. See, this year, you were starting kindergarten. And one day you’d be a seventh grader, like me. And you might be sitting in this library and come across this stupid magazine and see what I had seen when I looked at it: the space between Alma and her husband, that baby, too huge in her arms.

To me, this didn’t look like a happy family. It was a circus freak show, minus the big top. Why else would it be in a magazine? Normal families didn’t make the news.

In English class I asked to go to the bathroom. There, I tore the page out of the magazine and ripped the picture into the tiniest pieces I could. I flushed them down the toilet, the best I could do to protect you.

Marin

People think of the law as a virtual hallowed hall of justice, but the truth is that my job more closely resembles a bad sitcom. I once represented a woman who was carrying a frozen turkey out of her local Stop-n-Save grocery store the day before Thanksgiving, when the turkey slipped through the plastic bag and fractured her foot. She sued the Stop-n-Save, but we also included the company that made the plastic bags, and she walked away—without crutches, mind you—several hundred thousand dollars richer.

Then there was the case that involved a woman driving home at two a.m. on a back road at eighty miles per hour, who collided with a lost tractor trailer that had backed up across the road to turn around. She was killed instantly, and her husband wanted to sue the tractor-trailer company because they didn’t have lights along the side of the truck so that his wife could have seen it. We brought a wrongful death suit against the driver of the truck, citing loss of consortium—asking for millions to make up for the fact that the husband had lost his beloved wife’s company. Unfortunately, during the case, the defendant’s attorney uncovered the fact that my client’s wife had been on her way home from a rendezvous with her lover.

You win some, you lose some.

Looking at Charlotte O’Keefe, who was sitting in my office with her cell phone clutched in her hands, I was pretty sure which way this case was going to go. “Where’s Willow?” I asked.

“Physical therapy,” Charlotte said. “She’s there till eleven.”

“And the breaks? They’re healing well?”

“Fingers crossed,” Charlotte replied.

“You’re expecting a call?”

She looked down, as if she was surprised to find herself holding her phone. “Oh, no. I mean, I hope not. I just have to be available if Willow gets hurt.”

We smiled politely at each other. “Should we…wait a little longer for your husband?”

“Well,” she said, coloring. “He’s not going to be joining us.”

To be honest, when Charlotte had called me to set up a meeting and talk about representation, I’d been surprised. Sean O’Keefe had made his feelings pretty damn clear when he’d stormed out of Bob’s office. Her phone call indicated that he’d calmed down enough to pursue litigation, but now—looking at Charlotte—I was starting to get a sinking feeling. “But he does want to file a lawsuit, right?”

She shifted on her chair. “I don’t understand why I can’t do this on my own.”

“Besides the obvious answer—that your husband’s bound to find out sooner or later—there’s a legal reason. You and your husband are both responsible for the care and raising of Willow. Let’s say you hire a lawyer by yourself and settle with the doctor, and then you get hit by a car and die. Your husband can go back and sue the doctor on his own, because he wasn’t a party to your settlement and didn’t release the doctor from future liability. Because of this, any defendant is going to insist that any settlement that’s reached or judgment in a trial include both of the parents. Which means that, even if Sergeant O’Keefe doesn’t want to be part of this lawsuit, he’s going to be impleaded—that is, brought into the lawsuit—so that it won’t be litigated again in the future.”

Charlotte frowned. “I understand.”

“Is that going to be a problem?”

“No,” she said. “No, it’s not. But…we don’t have money to hire a lawyer. We’re barely scraping by as it is, with everything Willow needs. That’s why…that’s why I’m here today to talk about the lawsuit.”

Every plaintiff mill firm—Bob Ramirez included—began a case with a cost-benefit analysis. It’s what had taken us so long to contact the O’Keefes between meetings: I would review a claim with experts, I would do due diligence to ascertain other suits like this and what the payouts had been. Once I knew that the estimated settlement would at least cover the costs of our time and the experts’ fees, I’d call the prospective clients and tell them they had a valid complaint. “You don’t have to worry about attorney’s fees,” I now said smoothly. “That would become part of the settlement. However, realistically, you do need to know that most wrongful birth suits settle out of court for less money than a jury would award, because malpractice insurance companies don’t want the press. Of the cases that do go to court, seventy-five percent find in favor of the defendant. Your particular case, which hinges on a misread sonogram, might not sway the jury—sonograms don’t make the most convincing evidence at a trial. And there will be considerable public scrutiny. There always is, when someone brings a wrongful birth suit.”

She looked up at me. “You mean people will think I’m in it for the money.”

“Well,” I said simply. “Aren’t you?”

Charlotte’s eyes welled with tears. “I’m in it for Willow. I’m the one who brought her into this world, so it’s up to me to make sure that she suffers as little as possible. That doesn’t make me a monster.” She pressed her fingers to the corners of her eyes. “Or does it?”

I gritted my teeth and passed her a box of Kleenex. Well, wasn’t that the $64,000 question?

It was probable that, by the time this lawsuit got to court, you would be old enough to fully understand the ramifications of what your mother was doing—just like I had, one day, when I was told about my adoption. I knew what it was like to feel as if your own mom didn’t want you. In fact, I’d spent my whole childhood inventing excuses for her. Daydream 1: She was desperately in love with a boy who’d gotten her pregnant, and her family couldn’t bear the stain of shame, so they sent her to Switzerland and told everyone she was at boarding school when, instead, she was having me. Daydream 2: She was headed off to the Peace Corps to save the world when she found herself pregnant—and realized she had to put the needs of others above her own desire for a baby. Daydream 3: She was an actress, America’s sweetheart, who would lose her family-values mid-west audience if they learned that she was a single mom. Daydream 4: She and my father were poor, struggling dairy farmers who wanted their baby to have a better life than they could offer.

I figured there was one seminal moment when a woman realized what it meant to be a mother. For my birth mom, maybe it was when she passed me to a nurse and said good-bye. For the mother who’d raised me, it was when she sat me down at the kitchen table and told me that I had been adopted. For your mother, it was making the decision to file this lawsuit in spite of the public and private backlash. Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child.

“I wanted another baby so much,” Charlotte said quietly. “I wanted to experience that, with Sean. I wanted us to take her to the park and push her on the swings. I wanted to bake cookies with her and go to her school plays. I wanted to teach her how to ride a horse and water-ski. I wanted her to take care of me when I got old,” she said, looking up at me. “Not the other way around.”

I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I didn’t want to believe that a person who had brought a baby into this world would quit so easily when the going got tough. “I think most parents know there’s going to be some bad to go with the good,” I said evenly.

“I wasn’t naïve—I already had a daughter. I knew I’d take care of Willow when she was hurt. I knew I’d have to get up in the middle of the night when she had nightmares. But I didn’t know she was going to be hurt for weeks at a time, for years at a time. I didn’t know I’d be up with her every night. I didn’t know that she would never get better.”

I looked down, pretending to straighten some papers. What if the reason my mother had given me away was that I didn’t measure up to what she had hoped for? “What about Willow?” I said, bluntly playing devil’s advocate. “She’s a smart kid. How do you think she’ll handle her mother saying she should never have been born?”

Charlotte flinched. “She knows that’s not the truth,” she said. “I could never imagine my life without her in it.”

A red flag went up in my mind. “Stop right there. Don’t say that. You can’t even hint at it. If you file this lawsuit, Mrs. O’Keefe, you have to be able to swear—under oath—that if you’d known about your daughter’s illness earlier, if you’d been given the choice, you would have terminated the pregnancy.” I waited until her gaze met mine. “Is that going to be a problem?”

Her eyes slid away, focusing on something outside my window. “Can you miss a person you’ve never known?”

There was a knock at the door, and the receptionist popped her head in. “Sorry to interrupt, Marin,” Briony said, “but your eleven o’clock is here.”

“Eleven?” Charlotte said, jumping to her feet. “I’m late. Willow’s going to panic.” She grabbed her purse, slung it over her shoulder, and hurried out of my office.

“I’ll be in touch,” I called after her.

It wasn’t until that afternoon, when I began to think about what Charlotte O’Keefe had said to me, that I realized she’d answered my question about abortion with another question.

Sean

At ten o’clock on Saturday night, it became clear to me that I was going to hell.

Saturday nights were the ones that made you remember every sleepy picture-postcard New England town had a split personality, that the healthy, smiling guys you saw featured in Yankee magazine might pass out drunk at the local bar. On Saturday nights, lonely kids tried to hang themselves from the closet racks in their dorm rooms and high school girls got raped by college boys.

Saturday nights were also when you’d catch someone bobbing and weaving so bad in a car that it was only a matter of time before the drunk rammed into someone else. Tonight I was pulled over behind a bank parking lot when a white Camry crawled by, practically on the dotted yellow line. I flicked on my blues and followed the driver, waiting for the car to pull onto the shoulder.

I stepped out and approached the driver’s window. “Good evening,” I said, “do you know why—” But before I could finish asking the driver to tell me why he thought I’d pulled him over, the window rolled down and I found myself staring at our priest.

“Oh, Sean, it’s you,” Father Grady said. He had a shock of white hair that Amelia called his Einstein-do, and he was wearing his clerical collar. His eyes were glassy and bright.

I hesitated. “Father, I’m going to have to see your license and registration…”

“Not a problem,” the priest said, digging in his glove compartment. “You’re just doing your job.” I watched him fumble, dropping his license three times before he managed to hand it to me. I glanced inside the car but didn’t see any bottles or cans.

“Father, you were all over the road there.”

“Was I?”

I could smell alcohol on his breath. “You have any drinks tonight, Father?”

“Can’t say that I have…”

Priests couldn’t lie, could they? “You mind stepping out of the car for me?”

“Sure, Sean.” He stumbled out of the door and leaned against the hood of his Camry, his hands in his pockets. “Haven’t seen your family at Mass lately…”

“Father, do you wear contact lenses?”

“No…”

This was the beginning of the test for horizontal gaze nystagmus, an involuntary jerking of the eyeball that could suggest drunkenness. “I’m just going to ask you to follow this light,” I said, taking a penlight out of my pocket and holding it several inches away from his face, a bit above eye level. “Follow it only with your eyes—keep your head still,” I added. “Understand?”

Father Grady nodded. I checked his equal pupil size and tracking as he followed the beam, marking down a lack of smooth pursuit, and an end-point nystagmus as I moved the beam toward his left ear.

“Thanks, Father. Now, can you stand on your right foot for me, like this?” I demonstrated, and he lifted his left foot. He wobbled but stayed upright. “Now the left,” I said, and this time, he pitched forward.

“Okay, Father, one last thing—can you walk for me, heel to toe?” I showed him how and then watched him trip over his own feet.

Bankton was so tiny we didn’t ride with partners. I could have probably let Father Grady go; no one would have been the wiser, and maybe he’d even put a good word in to heaven for me. But letting him go also meant I would be lying to myself—and surely that was just as grievous a sin. Who might be driving on the roads that led to his house…a teenager, coming home from a date? A dad flying back from a business trip out of town? A mom with a sick kid, headed to the hospital? It wasn’t Father Grady I was trying to rescue, it was the people he might hurt in his condition.

“I hate to do this, Father, but I’m going to have to arrest you for driving under the influence.” I Mirandized him and gently led the priest into the back of the cruiser.

“What about my car?”

“It’ll be towed. You can get it tomorrow,” I said.

“But tomorrow’s Sunday!”

We were only about a half mile from the station, which was a blessing, because I didn’t think I could stand to make small talk with my priest after I’d arrested him. At the station, I went through the rigmarole of implied consent and told Father Grady I wanted him to take a Breathalyzer test. “You have the right to have a similar test or tests done by a person of your choosing,” I said. “You’ll be given the opportunity to request this additional test, if you want. If you do not permit a test at the direction of the law enforcement officer, you may lose your license for a period of one hundred and eighty days, not concurrent with any loss of license if found guilty of the charge of DUI.”

“No, Seanie, I trust you,” Father Grady said.

It didn’t surprise me when he blew a .15.

Since my shift was ending, I offered to take him back home. The road snaked in front of me as I passed the church and drove up a hill to the little white house that served as the rectory. I parked in the driveway and helped him walk a relatively straight line to the door. “I was at a wake tonight,” he said, turning his key in the lock.

“Father,” I sighed. “You don’t have to explain.”

“It was a boy—only twenty-six. Motorcycle accident last Tuesday, you probably know all about it. I knew I’d be driving home. But there was the mother, sobbing her heart out, and the brothers, completely shattered—and I wanted to leave them with a tribute, instead of with all that loss.”

I didn’t want to listen. I didn’t need to borrow anyone else’s problems. But I found myself nodding at the priest all the same.

“So it was a few toasts, a few shots of whiskey,” Father Grady said. “Don’t you lose sleep over this, Sean. I know perfectly well that doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.”

The door swung open in front of us. I’d never been inside the rectory before—it was homey and small, with framed psalms hanging on the walls for decoration, a crystal bowl of M&M’s on the kitchen table, and a Patriots banner behind the couch. “I’m just going to lie down,” Father Grady murmured, and he stretched out on the couch.

I took off his shoes and covered him with a blanket I found in a closet. “Good night, Father.”

His eyes opened a crack. “See you tomorrow at Mass?”

“You bet,” I said, but Father Grady had already started to snore.

When I had told Charlotte that I wanted to go to church the next morning, she asked if I was feeling all right. Usually, she had to drag me to Mass, but part of me had wanted to know if Father Grady was going to do a sermon about our encounter last night. Sins of the fathers, that’s what he could call it, I thought now, and I snickered. Beside me, in the pew, Charlotte pinched me. “Sssh,” she mouthed.

One of the reasons I didn’t like going to church was the stares. Piety and pity were a little too close to each other for my tastes. I’d listen to a blue-haired old lady tell me she was praying for you, and I’d smile and say thanks, but inside, I was ticked off. Who’d asked her to pray for you? Didn’t she realize I did enough of that on my own?

Charlotte said that an offer to help was not a comment on someone else’s weakness, and that a police officer ought to know that. But hell, if you wanted to know what I was really thinking when I asked a lost out-of-towner if he needed directions or gave a battered wife my card and told her to call me if she needed assistance, it was this: pull yourself up by your bootstraps and figure a way out of the mess you’ve gotten yourself into. There was a big difference, the way I saw it, between a nightmare you woke up in unexpectedly and a nightmare of your own making.

Father Grady winced as the organist started a particularly rousing version of a hymn, and I tucked away my grin. Instead of leaving the poor guy a glass of water last night, I should have mixed him up a hangover remedy.

Behind us, a baby started to wail. As mean-spirited as it was of me, it felt good to have everyone focused on a family other than ours. I heard the furious whispers of the parents deciding who would be the one to take the baby out of the church.

Amelia was sitting on my other side. She elbowed me and mimed for a pen. I reached into my pocket and handed her a ballpoint. Turning over her palm, she drew five tiny dashes and a hangman’s noose. I smiled and traced the letter A on her thigh.

She wrote: _A_A_

M, I wrote with my finger.

Amelia shook her head.

T?

_ATA_

I tried L, P, and R, but no luck. S?

Amelia beamed and scribbled it into the puzzle: SATA_

I laughed out loud, and Charlotte looked down at us, her eyes flashing a warning. Amelia took the pen and filled in the N, then held up her hand so I could see. Just then, loud and clear, you said, “What’s Satan?” and your mother turned bright red, hauled you into her arms, and hurried outside.

A moment later, Amelia and I followed. Charlotte was sitting with you on the steps of the church, holding the baby who’d been screaming during the whole Mass. “What are you doing out here?” she asked.

“Thought we’d be safer when the lightning struck.” I smiled down at the baby, who was stuffing grass into his mouth. “Did we pick up an extra along the way?”

“His mother’s in the bathroom,” Charlotte said. “Amelia, watch your sister and the baby.”

“Do I get paid for it?”

“I cannot believe you’d have the nerve to ask me that after what you just did during Mass.” Charlotte stood up. “Let’s take a walk.”

I fell into step beside her. Charlotte had always smelled of sugar cookies—later I learned that it was vanilla, which she would rub on her wrists and behind her ears, perfume for a pastry chef. It was part of why I loved her. Here’s a news flash for the ladies: for every one of you who thinks we all want a girl like Angelina Jolie, all skinny elbows and angles, the truth is, we’d rather curl up with someone like Charlotte—a woman who’s soft when a guy wraps his arms around her; a woman who might have a smear of flour on her shirt the whole day and not notice or care, not even when she goes out to meet with the PTA; a woman who doesn’t feel like an exotic vacation but is the home we can’t wait to come back to. “You know what?” I said genially, wrapping an arm around her. “Life is great. It’s a gorgeous day, I’m with my family, I’m not sitting in that cave of a church…”

“And I’m sure Father Grady enjoyed hearing Willow’s little outburst, too.”

“Believe me, Father Grady’s got bigger problems on his plate,” I said.

We had crossed the parking lot, heading toward a field overrun with clover. “Sean,” Charlotte said, “I’ve got a confession to make.”

“Maybe you ought to take that inside, then.”

“I went back to the lawyer.”

I stopped walking. “You what?”

“I met with Marin Gates, about filing a wrongful birth lawsuit.”

“Jesus Christ, Charlotte—”

“Sean!” She threw a glance toward the church.

“How could you do that? Just go behind my back like my opinion doesn’t matter?”

She folded her arms. “What about my opinion? Doesn’t that matter to you?”

“Of course it does—but some bloodsucking lawyer’s opinion, I don’t give a shit about. Don’t you see what they’re doing? They want money, pure and simple. They don’t give a damn about you or me or Willow; they don’t care who’s screwed during the process. We’re just a means to an end.” I took a step closer to her. “So Willow’s got some problems—who doesn’t? There’s kids with ADHD and kids who sneak out at night to smoke and drink and kids who get beat up at school for liking math—you don’t see those parents trying to blame someone else so they can get cash.”

“How come you were perfectly willing to sue Disney World and half of the public service system in Florida for cash? What’s different here?”

I jerked my chin up. “They played us for fools.”

“What if the doctors did, too?” Charlotte argued. “What if Piper made a mistake?”

“Then she made a mistake!” I shrugged. “Would it have changed the outcome? If you’d known about all the breaks, all the trips to the ER, all we’d have to do for Willow, would you have wanted her any less?”

She opened her mouth, and then resolutely clamped it shut.

That scared the hell out of me.

“So what if she winds up in a lot of casts?” I said, reaching for Charlotte’s hand. “She also knows the name of every bone in the freaking body and she hates the color yellow and she told me last night she wants to be a beekeeper when she grows up. She’s our little girl, Charlotte. We don’t need help. We’ve handled this for five years; we’ll keep handling it ourselves.”

Charlotte drew away from me. “Where’s the we, Sean? You go off to work. You go out with the guys for poker night. You make it sound like you’re with Willow twenty-four/seven, but you have no idea what that’s like.”

“Then we’ll get a visiting nurse. An aide…”

“And we’ll pay her with what?” Charlotte snapped. “Come to think of it, how are we going to afford a new car big enough to carry Willow’s chair and walker and crutches, since ours is going on two hundred thousand miles? How are we going to pay off her surgeries, the parts insurance won’t cover? How are we going to make sure her house has a handicapped ramp and a kitchen sink low enough for a wheelchair?”

“Are you saying I can’t provide for my own kid?” I said, my voice escalating.

Suddenly, all the bluster went out of Charlotte. “Oh, Sean. You’re the best father. But…you’re not a mother.”

There was a shriek, and—instinct kicking in—both Charlotte and I sprinted across the parking lot, expecting to find Willow twisted on the pavement with a bone breaking through her skin. Instead, Amelia was holding the crying baby at arm’s length, a stain streaking the front of her shirt. “It barfed on me!” she wailed.

The baby’s mother came hurrying out of the church. “I’m so sorry,” she said, to us, to Amelia, as Willow sat on the ground, laughing at her sister’s bad luck. “I think he might be coming down with something…”

Charlotte stepped forward and took the baby from Amelia. “Maybe a virus,” she said. “Don’t worry. These things happen.”

She stood back as the woman gave a wad of Baby Wipes to Amelia to clean herself off. “This conversation is over,” I murmured to Charlotte. “Period.”

Charlotte bounced the baby in her arms. “Sure, Sean,” she said, too easily. “Whatever you say.”

By six o’clock that night, Charlotte had caught whatever the baby had, and was sick as a dog. Vomiting like crazy, she’d sequestered herself in the bathroom. I was supposed to work the night shift, but it was blatantly clear that wasn’t going to happen. “Amelia needs help with her science homework,” Charlotte murmured, patting her face with a damp towel. “And the girls need dinner…”

“I’ll take care of it,” I said. “What else do you need?”

“To die?” Charlotte moaned, and she shoved me out of the way to kneel in front of the toilet again.

I backed out of the bathroom, closing the door behind me. Downstairs, you were sitting on the living room couch eating a banana. “You’re gonna spoil your appetite,” I said.

“I’m not eating it, Daddy. I’m fixing it.”

“Fixing it,” I repeated. On the table in front of you was a knife, which you weren’t supposed to have—I made a mental note to yell at Amelia for getting you one. There was a slice down the center of the banana.

You popped open the lid of a mending kit we’d taken from the hotel room in Florida, pulled out a prethreaded needle, and started to sew up the wound in the banana skin.

“Willow,” I said. “What are you doing?”

You blinked up at me. “Surgery.”

I watched you for a few stitches, to make sure you didn’t poke yourself with the needle, and then shrugged. Far be it from me to stand in the way of science.

In the kitchen, Amelia was sprawled across the table with markers, glue, and a piece of poster board. “You want to tell me why Willow’s out there with a paring knife?” I said.

“Because she asked for one.”

“If she asked for a chain saw, would you have gotten it out of the garage?”

“Well, that would kind of be overkill for cutting up a banana, don’t you think?” Looking down at her project, Amelia sighed. “This totally sucks. I have to make a board game about the digestive system, and everyone’s going to make fun of me because we all know where the digestive system ends.”

“Funny you should use that word,” I said.

“G-R-O-double-S, Dad.”

I started pulling pots and pans out from beneath the counter and set out a frying pan. “What do you say to pancakes for dinner?” Not that they had a choice; it was the only thing I knew how to cook, except for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

“Mom made pancakes for breakfast,” Amelia complained.

“Did you know that dissolvable stitches are made out of animal guts?” you called out.

“No, and now I kind of wish I didn’t…”

Amelia rubbed a glue stick over her poster board. “Is Mom better yet?”

“No, baby.”

“But she promised me she’d help draw the esophagus.”

“I can help,” I said.

“You can’t draw, Dad. When we play Pictionary you always make a house, even when that has nothing to do with the answer.”

“Well, how hard can an esophagus be? It’s a tube, right?” I rummaged for a box of Bisquick.

There was a thump; the knife had rolled under the couch. You were twisting uncomfortably. “Hang on, Wills, I can get that for you,” I called.

“I don’t need it anymore,” you said, but you hadn’t stopped squirming.

Amelia sighed. “Willow, stop being such a baby before you pee in your pants.”

I looked from your sister to you. “Do you have to go to the bathroom?”

“She’s making that face she makes when she’s trying to hold it in—”

“Amelia, enough.” I walked into the living room and crouched down beside you. “Honey, you don’t have to be embarrassed.”

You flattened your lips together. “I want Mom to take me.”

“Mom’s not here,” Amelia snapped.

I hoisted you off the couch to carry you into the downstairs bathroom. I’d just wrangled your awkwardly cast legs into the doorframe when you said, “You forgot the garbage bags.”

Charlotte had told me how she’d line them inside your cast before you went to the bathroom. In all the time you’d been in your spica, I hadn’t been pressed into duty for this—you were wildly self-conscious about having me pull down your pants. I reached around the doorframe to the dryer, where Charlotte had stashed a box of kitchen trash bags. “Okay,” I said. “I’m a novice, so you have to tell me what to do.”

“You have to swear you won’t peek,” you said.

“Cross my heart.”

You untied the knot that was holding up the gigantic boxer shorts we’d pulled over your spica, and I lifted you up so that they would pool at your hips. As I pulled them off, you squealed. “Look up here!”

“Right.” I resolutely fixed my eyes on yours, trying to maneuver the shorts off you without seeing what I was doing. Then I held up the garbage bag, which would have to be tucked in along the crotch line. “You want to do this part?” I asked, blushing.

I held you under the armpits while you struggled to line the cast with the plastic. “Ready,” you said, and I positioned you over the toilet.

“No, back more,” you said, and I adjusted you and waited.

And waited.

“Willow,” I said, “go ahead and pee.”

“I can’t. You’re listening.”

“I’m not listening—”

“Yes you are.”

“Your mother listens…”

“That’s different,” you said, and you burst into tears.

Once the floodgates opened, they opened universally. I glanced down at the bowl of the toilet, only to hear you cry louder. “You said you wouldn’t peek!”

I snapped my eyes north, juggled you into my left arm, and reached for the toilet paper with the right.

“Dad!” Amelia yelled. “I think something’s burning…”

“Oh shit,” I muttered, giving only a passing thought to the swear jar. I stuffed a wad of paper into your hand. “Hurry up, Willow,” I said, and then I flushed the toilet.

“I h-have to w-wash my hands,” you hiccuped.

“Later,” I bit out, and I carried you back to the couch, tossing your shorts into your lap before racing to the kitchen.

Amelia stood in front of the stove, where the pancakes were charring. “I turned off the burner,” she said, coughing through the smoke.

“Thanks.” She nodded and reached around me onto the counter for…Were those what I thought they were? Sure enough, Amelia sat down and picked up the hot glue gun. She’d affixed about thirty of my good clay poker chips around the edge of her poster board.

“Amelia!” I yelled. “Those are my poker chips!”

“You have a whole bunch. I just needed a few…”

“Did I tell you you could use them?”

“You didn’t tell me I couldn’t,” Amelia said.

“Daddy,” you called out from the living room, “my hands!”

“Okay,” I said under my breath. “Okay.” I counted to ten, and then carried the pan to the trash to scrape out its contents. The metal lip grazed my wrist and I dropped the pan. “Sonofabitch,” I cried, and I switched on the cold-water faucet, thrusting my arm beneath it.

“I want to wash my hands,” you wailed.

Amelia folded her arms. “You owe Willow a quarter,” she said.

By nine o’clock, you girls were asleep and the pots had been washed and the dishwasher was humming in the kitchen. I went around the house, turning out the lights, then crept into the dark bedroom. Charlotte was lying down with one arm thrown over her head. “You don’t have to tiptoe,” she said. “I’m awake.”

I sank down beside her. “You feeling any better?”

“I’m down a dress size. How are the girls?”

“Fine. Although I’m sorry to say Willow’s patient didn’t survive.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing.” I rolled onto my back. “We had peanut butter and jelly for dinner.”

She patted my arm absently. “You know what I love about you?”

“Hmm?”

“You make me look so good by comparison…”

I propped my arms behind my head and stared up at the ceiling. “You don’t bake anymore.”

“Yeah, but I don’t burn the pancakes,” Charlotte said, smiling a little. “Amelia ratted you out when she came in to say good night.”

“I’m serious. Remember how you used to make crème brûlée and petit fours and chocolate éclairs?”

“I guess other things became more important,” Charlotte answered.

“You used to say you’d have your own bakery one day. You wanted to call it Syllable—”

“Syllabub,” she corrected.

I may not have remembered the name right, but I knew what it meant, because I’d asked you: syllabub was the oldest English dessert, made when dairymaids would shoot warm milk straight from the cow into a pail that held cider or sherry. It was like eggnog, you told me, and you promised me you’d make me some to try, and the night you did you dipped a finger in the sweet cream and traced a trail down my chest that you kissed clean.

“That’s what happens to dreams,” Charlotte said. “Life gets in the way.”

I sat up, picking at a stitch on the quilt. “I wanted a house, a backyard, a bunch of kids. A vacation every now and then. A good job. I wanted to coach softball and take my girls skiing and not know every fucking doctor in the Portsmouth Regional Hospital emergency room by name.” I turned to her. “I may not be with her all the time, but when she breaks, Charlotte, I feel it. I swear I do. I’d do anything for her.”

She faced me. “Would you?”

I could feel its weight on the mattress: the lawsuit, the elephant in the room. “It feels…ugly. It feels like we’re saying we didn’t love her, because she’s…the way she is.”

“It’s because we want her, because we love her, that I’d ever think about this in the first place,” Charlotte said. “I’m not stupid, Sean. I know people are going to talk, and say I’m after a big settlement. I know they’re going to think I’m the worst mother in the world, the most selfish, you fill in the blank. But I don’t care what they say about me—I care about Willow. I want to know that she’ll be able to go to college and live on her own and do everything she dreams of. Even if that means that the whole world thinks I’m horrible. Does it really matter what everyone else says if I know why I’m doing it?” She faced me. “I’m going to lose my best friend because of this,” she said. “I don’t want to lose you, too.”

In her previous life as a pastry chef, I’d always been amazed to watch tiny Charlotte hauling fifty-pound bags of flour around. There was strength in her that went far beyond my own size and force. I saw the world in black and white; it was why I was a career cop. But what if this lawsuit and its uncomfortable name was only a means to an end? Could something that looked so wrong on the outside turn out to be undeniably right?

My hand crept across the quilt to cover hers. “You won’t,” I said.

Charlotte

Late May 2007

Your first seven breaks happened before you entered this world. The next four happened minutes after you were born, as a nurse lifted you out of me. Another nine, when you were being resuscitated in the hospital, after you coded. The tenth: when you were lying across my lap and suddenly I heard a pop. Eleven was when you rolled over and your arm hit the edge of the crib. Twelve and thirteen were femur fractures; fourteen a tibia; fifteen a compression fracture of the spine. Sixteen was jumping down from a stoop; seventeen was a kid crashing into you on a playground; eighteen was when you slipped on a DVD jacket lying on the carpet. We still don’t know what caused number nineteen. Twenty was when Amelia was jumping on a bed where you were sitting; twenty-one was a soccer ball that hit your left leg too hard; twenty-two was when I discovered waterproof casting materials and bought enough to supply an entire hospital, now stocked in my garage. Twenty-three happened in your sleep; twenty-four and twenty-five were a fall forward in the snow that snapped both forearms at once. Twenty-six and twenty-seven were nasty fractures, fibula and tibia tenting through the skin at a nursery school Halloween party, where, ironically, you were wearing a mummy’s costume whose bandages I used to splint the breaks. Twenty-eight happened during a sneeze; twenty-nine and thirty were ribs you broke on the edge of the kitchen table. Thirty-one was a hip fracture that required a metal plate and six screws. I stopped keeping track after that, until the ones from Disney World, which we had not numbered but instead named Mickey, Donald, and Goofy.

Four months after you were put in the spica cast, it was bivalved. This meant that it was cut in half and secured with low-budget clips that broke within hours, so I replaced them with bright strips of Velcro. Gradually, we’d remove the top, so that you could practice sitting up like a clam on the half shell, and you could strengthen the stomach and calf muscles that had deteriorated. According to Dr. Rosenblad, you’d have a couple of weeks in the bottom of the shell; then you’d graduate to just sleeping in it. Eight weeks later you’d stand with a walker; four weeks after that, you’d be moving to the bathroom on your own.

The best part, though, was that you could go back to preschool. It was a private school, held for two hours each morning in the basement of a church. You were a year older than other kids in the class, but you’d missed so much school because of breaks that we’d decided to repeat the year—you could read at a sixth-grade level, but you needed to be around other kids your age for socialization. You didn’t have many friends—children were either frightened by your wheelchair and walker or, oddly, jealous of the casts that you’d come to school wearing. Now, driving to the church, I glanced into the rearview mirror. “So what are you going to do first?”

“The rice table.” Miss Katie, whom you ranked somewhere just shy of Jesus on the adoration scale, had set up an enormous sandbox full of colored rice grains, which kids could pour into different size containers. You loved the noise it made; you told me it sounded like rain. “And the parachute.”

This was a game where one child ran under a brightly colored round of silk while the rest held on to its edges. “You’re going to have to wait a while for that, Wills,” I said, and I pulled into the parking lot. “One day at a time.”

I unloaded your wheelchair from the back of the van and settled you into it, then pushed you up the ramp that the school had added this past summer, after you’d enrolled. Inside, other students were hanging their coats in their cubbies; moms were rolling up dried finger paintings that were hanging on a clothes rack. “You’re back!” one woman said, smiling down at you. Then she looked up at me. “Kelsey had her birthday party last weekend—she saved a goody bag for Willow. We would have invited her, but, well, it was at the Gymnastics Hut, and I figured she might feel left out.”

As opposed to not being invited? I thought. But instead, I smiled. “That was very thoughtful.”

A little boy touched the edges of your spica cast. “Wow,” he breathed. “How do you pee in that thing?”

“I don’t,” you said, without cracking a smile. “I haven’t gone in four months, Derek, so you’d better watch out ’cause I could blow like a volcano any minute.”

“Willow,” I murmured, “no need to be snarky.”

“He started it…”

Miss Katie came into the hallway as she heard the commotion of our arrival. She did the slightest double take when she saw you in the bivalved cast but quickly recovered. “Willow!” she said, getting down on her knees to your level. “It is so nice to see you!” She summoned her assistant, Miss Sylvia. “Sylvia, can you keep an eye on Willow while her mom and I have a talk?”

I followed her down the hallway past the bathrooms with their impossibly squat toilets to the area that doubled as music room and gymnasium. “Charlotte,” Kate said, “I must have misunderstood. When you called to tell me Willow was coming, I thought she was out of that body cast!”

“Well, she will be. It’s a gradual thing.” I smiled at her. “She’s really excited to be back here.”

“I think you’re rushing things—”

“It’s fine, really. She needs the activity. Even if she breaks again, a break after a few weeks of really great play is better for her body than just sitting around at home. And you don’t have to worry about the other kids hurting her, beyond the usual. We wrestle with her. We tickle her.”

“Yes, but you do all that at home,” the teacher pointed out. “In a school environment…Well, it’s riskier.”

I stepped back, reading her loud and clear: we’re liable when she’s on our grounds. In spite of the Americans with Disabilities Act, I routinely read on online OI forums of private schools who kindly suggested that a healing child be kept at home, ostensibly for the child’s best interests but more likely because of their own rising insurance premiums. It created a catch-22: legally, you had clear grounds to sue for discrimination, but once you did, you could bet that, even if you won your case, your child would be treated differently when she returned.

“Riskier for whom?” I said, my face growing hot. “I paid tuition to have my daughter here. Kate, you know damn well you can’t tell me she’s not welcome.”

“I’m happy to refund you tuition for the months she’s missed. And I would never tell you that Willow’s not welcome—we love her, and we’ve missed her. We just want to make sure she’s safe.” She shook her head. “Look at it from our point of view. Next year, when Willow’s in kindergarten, she’ll have a full-time aide. We don’t have that resource here.”

“Then I’ll be her aide. I’ll stay with her. Just let her”—my voice snapped like a twig—“let her feel like she’s normal.”

Kate looked up at me. “Do you think being the only child with a parent in the classroom is going to make her feel that way?”

Speechless—fuming—I strode down the hall to where Miss Sylvia was still waiting with you, watching you show off the cast’s Velcro straps. “We have to go,” I said, blinking back tears.

“But I want to play at the rice table…”

“You know what?” Kate said. “Miss Sylvia will get you your own bag to take home! Thanks for coming to say hello to all your friends, Willow.”

Confused, you turned to me. “Mommy? Why can’t I stay?”

“We’ll talk about it later.”

Miss Sylvia returned with a Ziploc full of purple rice grains. “Here you go, pumpkin.”

“Tell me this,” I said, eyeing each of the teachers in turn. “What good is a life if she doesn’t get to live it?”

I pushed you out of the school, still so angry that it took me a moment to realize you were deathly silent. When we reached the van, you had tears in your eyes. “It’s okay, Mom,” you said, with a resignation in your voice that no five-year-old ought to have. “I didn’t want to stay anyway.”

That was a lie; I knew how much you had been looking forward to seeing your friends.

“You know how, when there’s a rock in the water, the water just moves around the sides of it as if it’s not there?” you said. “That’s kind of how the other kids acted when you were talking to Miss Katie.”

How could those teachers—or those other kids—not see how easily you bruised? I kissed you on the forehead. “You and I,” I promised, “are going to have so much fun this afternoon, you aren’t going to know what hit you.” I leaned down to hoist you out of your wheelchair, but one of the Velcro straps on the cast popped open. “Shoot,” I muttered, and as I jostled you to one hip to fix it, you dropped your Ziploc bag.

“My rice!” you said, and you instinctively twisted in my arms to reach it, which is exactly the moment I heard the snap: like a branch breaking, like the first bite of an autumn apple.

“Willow?” I said, but I already knew: the whites of your eyes had flashed, blue as lightning, and you were slipping away from me into the sleepy trance that would overcome you when it was a particularly bad fracture.

By the time I settled you in the back of the van, your eyes were nearly closed. “Baby, tell me where it hurts,” I begged, but you didn’t answer. Starting at the wrist, I gently felt up your arm, trying to find the tender spot. I had just hit a divot beneath your shoulder when you whimpered. But you had broken bones in the arm before, and this one wasn’t stuck through the skin or twisted at a ninety-degree angle or any of the other hallmarks I associated with the kind of severe break that made you slip into a stupor. Had the bone pierced an organ?

I could have gone back into the school and asked them to call 911, but there was nothing an EMT could do for you that I didn’t know how to do myself. So I rummaged in the back of the van and found an old People magazine. Using it as an immobilizer, I wrapped an Ace bandage around your upper arm. I winged a prayer that you wouldn’t have to be casted—casts made bone density drop, and each place a cast ended was a new weak point for a future break. You could get away with a Wee Walker boot or an Aircast or a splint most of the time—except for hip fractures, and vertebrae, and femurs. Those breaks were the ones that made you go still and quiet, like now. Those breaks were the ones that had me driving straight to the ER, because I was too scared to handle them on my own.

At the hospital, I pulled into a handicapped spot and carried you into triage. “My daughter has osteogenesis imperfecta,” I told the nurse. “She’s broken her arm.”

The woman pursed her lips. “How about you do the diagnosis after you get a medical degree?”

“Trudy, is there a problem?” A doctor who looked too young to even be shaving was suddenly standing in front of us, peering down at you. “Did I hear you say OI?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think it’s her humerus.”

“I’ll take care of this one,” the doctor said. “I’m Dr. Dewitt. Do you want to put her in a wheelchair—”

“We’re good,” I said, and I hoisted you higher in my arms. As he led us down the hall to Radiology, I gave him your medical history. He stopped me only once—to sweet-talk the technician into giving up a room quickly. “Okay,” the doctor said, leaning over you on the X-ray table, his hand on your forearm. “I’m just going to move this the tiniest bit…”

“No,” I said, stepping forward. “You can move the machine, can’t you?”

“Well,” Dr. Dewitt said, nonplussed. “We don’t usually.”

“But you can?”

He looked at me again and then made adjustments to the equipment, draping the heavy lead vest over your chest. I moved to the rear of the room so the film could be taken. “Good job, Willow. Now just one more of your lower arm,” the doctor said.

“No,” I said.

The doctor looked up, exasperated. “With all due respect, Mrs. O’Keefe, I really need to do my job.”

But I was doing mine, too. When you broke, I tried to limit the number of X-rays that were done; sometimes I had them skipped altogether if they weren’t going to change the outcome of the treatment. “We already know she’s got a break,” I reasoned. “Do you think it’s displaced?”

The doctor’s eyes widened as I spoke his own language to him. “No.”

“Then you don’t really have to X-ray the tibia and fibula, do you?”

“Well,” Dr. Dewitt admitted. “That depends.”

“Do you have any idea how many X-rays my daughter will have to get in the course of her lifetime?” I asked.

He folded his arms. “You win. We really don’t need to X-ray the lower arm.”

While we waited for the film to develop, I rubbed your back. Slowly, you were returning from wherever it was that you went when you had a break. You were fidgeting more, whimpering. Shivering, which only made you hurt more.

I stuck my head out of the room to ask a technician if she had a blanket I might wrap around you and found Dr. Dewitt approaching with your X-rays. “Willow’s cold,” I said, and he whipped off his white coat and settled it over your shoulders as soon as he stepped into the room. “The good news,” he said, “is that Willow’s other break is healing nicely.”

What other break?

I didn’t realize I’d said it aloud until the doctor pointed to a spot on your upper arm. It was hard to see—the collagen defect left your bones milky—but sure enough, there was the ridge of callus that suggested a healing fracture.

I felt a stab of guilt. When had you hurt yourself, and how could I not have known?

“Looks like it’s about two weeks old,” Dr. Dewitt mused, and just like that, I remembered: one night, when I carried you to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I had nearly dropped you. Although you’d insisted you were fine, you had only been lying for my sake.

“I am amazed to report, Willow, that you’ve broken one of the bones that’s hardest to break in the human body—your shoulder blade.” He pointed to the second image on the light board, to a crack clear down the middle of the scapula. “It moves around so much, it’s hardly ever fractured on impact.”

“So what do we do?” I asked.

“Well, she’s already in a spica cast…Short of mummification, the best thing is probably going to be a sling. It’s going to hurt for a few days—but the alternative seems like cruel and unusual punishment.” He bandaged your arm up against your chest, like the broken wing of a bird. “That too tight?”

You looked up at him. “I broke my clavicle once. It hurt more. Did you know that clavicle means ‘little key’—not just because it looks like one but because it connects all the other bones in the chest?”

Dr. Dewitt’s jaw dropped. “Are you some kind of Doogie Howser prodigy?”

“She reads a lot,” I said, smiling.

“Scapula, sternum, and xiphoid,” you added. “I can spell them, too.”

“Damn,” the doctor said softly, and then he blushed. “I mean, darn.” His gaze met mine over your head. “She’s the first OI patient I’ve had. It must be pretty wild.”

“Yes,” I said. “Wild.”

“Well, Willow, if you want to come work here as an ortho resident, there’s a white coat with your name on it.” He nodded at me. “And if you ever need someone to talk to…” He took a business card out of his breast pocket.

I tucked it into my back pocket, embarrassed. This probably wasn’t goodwill as much as it was preservation for Willow—the doctor had evidence of my own incompetence, two breaks up there in black and white. I pretended to be busy rummaging for something in my purse, but really, I was just waiting for him to leave. I heard him offer you a lollipop, say good-bye.

How could I claim to know what was best for you, what you deserved, when at any moment I might be thrown a curveball—and learn that I hadn’t protected you as well as I should have? Was I considering this lawsuit because of you, or to atone for all the things I’d done wrong up to this point?

Like wishing for a baby. Each month when I’d realized that Sean and I had again not conceived, I used to strip and stand in the shower with the water streaming down my face, praying to God; praying to get pregnant, no matter what.

I hoisted you into my arms—my left hip, since it was your right shoulder that had broken—and walked out of the examination room. The doctor’s card was burning a hole in my back pocket. I was so distracted, in fact, that I nearly ran over a little girl who was walking in the door of the hospital just as we were walking out. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” I said, and backed up. She was about your age, and she held on to her mother’s hand. She wore a pink tutu and mud boots with frog faces on the toes. Her head was completely bald.

You did the one thing you hated most when it happened to you: you stared.

The little girl stared back.

You’d learned early on that strangers would stare at a girl in a wheelchair. I’d taught you to smile at them, to say hello, so that they’d realize you were a person and not just some curiosity of nature. Amelia was your fiercest protector—if she saw a kid gawking at you, she’d walk right up and tell him that was what would happen if he didn’t clean his room or eat his vegetables. Once or twice, she’d made a child burst into tears, and I almost didn’t reprimand her because it made you smile and sit up straighter in your wheelchair, instead of trying to be invisible.

But this was different; this was an equal match.

I squeezed your waist. “Willow,” I chided.

The girl’s mother looked up at me. A thousand words passed between us, although neither of us spoke. She nodded at me, and I nodded back.

You and I walked out of the hospital into a late spring day that smelled of cinnamon and asphalt. You squinted, tried to raise your arm to shield your eyes, and remembered that it was bound tight against your body. “That girl, Mommy,” you said. “Why did she look like that?”

“Because she’s sick, and that’s what happens when she takes her medicine.”

You considered this for a moment. “I’m so lucky…my medicine lets me have hair.”

I was careful not to cry around you, but this time I could not help it. Here you were, with three out of four extremities broken. Here you were, with a healing fracture I hadn’t even known occurred. Here you were, period. “Yes, we’re lucky,” I said.

You put your hand against my cheek. “It’s okay, Mom,” you said. And just as I’d done for you in the ER, you patted my back, the very same spot you’d broken in your own body.

Sean

“Stop, goddammit!” I yelled as I sprinted across the empty park, holding the can of spray paint. The kid still had a lead on me, not to mention the benefit of being thirty years younger, but I wasn’t going to let him get away. Not even if it killed me, which, judging from the stitch in my side, it just might.

It had been one of those unseasonably warm spring days that made me remember what it felt like to be a kid, listening to the slap of girls’ flip-flops as they walked past you at the town pool. I admit, during my lunch break, I’d put on some running shorts and taken a quick dip. We wouldn’t be swimming for a while—out of solidarity with you, since you couldn’t go into a pool until you were out of your spica cast. There was nothing you wanted to do more than swim—something you’d never really learned to do because of various breaks. Even after Charlotte had discovered fiberglass casts—which were waterproof and wicked expensive—you somehow managed to miss the swim-lesson season for one reason or another. When Amelia was being a particularly nasty preadolescent, she’d lord over you the fact that she was headed to a pool party or out to the beach. Then you’d spend the whole day sulking or, in one memorable case, getting on the Internet and submitting a bid request for an in-ground pool—something we had neither the land nor the money for. Sometimes I thought you were obsessed with water—frozen in the winter or chlorinated in the summer; all you wanted was exactly what you couldn’t have.

Sort of like the rest of us, I guess.

Now, my hair was still wet; I smelled of chlorine—and I was trying to figure out how I could mask that from you when I got home. The car windows were rolled down as I cruised by the local park, where a Little League game had recently broken up. And then I noticed a kid spray-painting graffiti on the dugout in broad daylight.

I don’t know what frustrated me more—the fact that this boy was defacing public property or the fact that he was doing it right under my nose, without even the pretense of hiding. I parked far away and sneaked up behind him. “Hey,” I called. “You want to tell me what you’re doing?”

He turned around, caught in the act. He was tall and whip-thin, with stringy yellow hair and a sad attempt at a mustache crawling over his upper lip. His gaze met mine, clear and defiant, and then he dropped the spray can and started running.

I took off, too. The boy darted away from the park’s borders and crossed beneath an overpass, where his sneaker slipped in a puddle of mud. He stumbled, which gave me just enough time to throw my weight into him and shove him up against the concrete wall, with my arm pushing into his throat. “I asked you a question,” I grunted. “What the fuck were you doing?”

He clawed at my arm, choking, and suddenly I saw myself through his eyes.

I wasn’t one of those cops who liked to use my position to bully people. So what had set me off so quickly? As I fell back, I figured it out: it wasn’t the fact that the boy had been spray-painting the dugout, or that he hadn’t shown remorse when I first arrived on the scene. It was that he’d run. That he could run.

I was angry at him because you, in this situation, couldn’t have escaped.

The kid was bent over, coughing. “Jesus fucking Christ!” he gasped.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Really sorry.”

He stared at me like an animal that had been cornered. “Get it over with, already. Arrest me.”

I turned away. “Just go. Before I change my mind.”

There was a beat of silence and then, again, the sound of running footsteps.

I leaned against the wall of the overpass and closed my eyes. These days, it felt like anger was a geyser inside of me, destined to explode at regular intervals. Sometimes that meant a kid like this one was on the receiving end. Sometimes it was my own child—I’d find myself yelling at Amelia for something inconsequential, like leaving her cereal bowl on top of the television, when it was an infraction I was just as likely to commit myself. And sometimes it was Charlotte I complained to—for cooking meat loaf when I’d wanted chicken cutlets, for not keeping the kids quiet when I was sleeping after a late-night shift, for not knowing where I’d left my keys, for making me think there might be someone to be angry with in the first place.

I was no stranger to lawsuits. I’d sued Ford, once, after riding around in a cruiser gave me a herniated disk. And okay, maybe it was their fault and maybe it wasn’t, but they settled and I used the money to buy a van so we could move your wheelchairs and adaptive equipment around—and I’m quite sure that Ford Motor Company never even blinked when they cut the check for twenty thousand dollars in damages. But this was different; this wasn’t a lawsuit that blamed something that had happened to you—it was a lawsuit to blame the fact that you were here. Although I could easily earmark what we could do for you with a big settlement, I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that, in order to get it, I’d have to lie.

For Charlotte, this didn’t seem to be a problem. And that got me thinking: What else was she lying about, even now, that I didn’t realize? Was she happy? Did she wish she could have started over, without me, without you? Did she love me?

What kind of father did it make me if I refused to file a lawsuit that might net you enough money to live comfortably for the rest of your life, instead of scraping money here and there and taking on extra shifts at high school basketball games and proms so that we’d have enough to buy you a memory-foam mattress, an electric wheelchair, an adapted car to drive? Then again, what kind of father did it make me if the only way to net those rewards was to pretend I didn’t want you here?

I leaned my head back against the concrete, my eyes closed. If you had been born without OI, and wound up in a car crash that left you paralyzed, I would have gone to an attorney’s office and had them look up every accident report that involved that make and model car to see if there was something faulty with the vehicle, something that might have led to the crash—so that the people responsible for hurting you would pay. Was a wrongful birth lawsuit really all that different?

It was. It was, because when I even whispered the words to myself in front of the mirror while I was shaving, it made me feel sick to my stomach.

My cell phone began to ring, reminding me that I’d been away from the cruiser longer than I’d intended. “Hello?”

“Dad, it’s me,” Amelia said. “Mom never picked me up.”

I glanced down at my watch. “School ended two hours ago.”

“I know. She’s not home, and she’s not answering her cell phone.”

“I’m on my way,” I said.

Ten minutes later, a sullen Amelia swung into the cruiser. “Great. I just love being driven home in a cop car. Imagine the rumor mill.”

“Lucky for you, Drama Queen, that the whole town knows your father’s a policeman.”

“Did you talk to Mom?”

I had tried, but like Amelia said, she wasn’t answering any phone. The reason why became crystal clear when I pulled into our driveway and saw her carefully extricating you from the backseat—not just confined by your spica cast but sporting a new bandage that bound your upper arm to your body.

Charlotte turned as she heard us drive up, and winced. “Amelia,” she said. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I totally forgot—”

“Yeah, so what else is new?” Amelia muttered, and she stalked into the house.

I took you out of your mother’s arms. “What happened, Wills?”

“I broke my scapula,” you said. “It’s really hard to do.”

“The shoulder blade, can you believe it?” Charlotte said. “Clear down the middle.”

“You didn’t answer your phone.”

“My battery died.”

“You could have called from the hospital.”

Charlotte looked up. “You can’t actually be angry with me, Sean. I’ve been a little busy—”

“Don’t you think I deserve to know if my daughter gets hurt?”

“Could you keep your voice down?”

“Why?” I demanded. “Why not let everyone listen? They’re going to hear it all anyway, once you file—”

“I refuse to discuss this in front of Willow—”

“Well, you’d better get over that fast, sweetheart, because she’s going to hear every last ugly word of it.”

Charlotte’s face turned red, and she took you out of my arms and carried you into the house. She settled you on the couch, handed you the television remote, then walked into the kitchen, expecting me to follow. “What the hell is the matter with you?”

“With me? You’re the one who left Amelia sitting for two hours after school—”

“It was an accident—”

“Speaking of accidents,” I said.

“It wasn’t a serious break.”

“You know what, Charlotte? It looks pretty fucking serious to me.”

“What would you have done if I called you, anyway? Left work early again? That would be one less day you were getting paid, which means we’d be doubly screwed.”

I felt the skin on the back of my neck tighten. Here was the underlying message in that goddamn lawsuit, the invisible ink that would show up between the lines of every court document: Sean O’Keefe doesn’t make enough money to take care of his daughter’s special needs…which is why it’s come to this.

“You know what I think?” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “That if the shoe was on the other foot—if I’d been with Willow when she got hurt—and I didn’t call you, you’d be furious. And you know what else I think? The reason you didn’t call me has nothing to do with my job or with your cell phone battery. It’s that you’ve already made up your mind. You’re going to do whatever the hell you want, whenever the hell you want, no matter what I say.” I stormed out of the house to my cruiser, still idling in the driveway, because God forbid I left my shift early.

I smacked my hand on the steering wheel, inadvertently honking the horn. The noise brought Charlotte to the window. Her face was tiny and white, an oval whose features were blurred at this distance.

I had asked Charlotte to marry me with petit fours. I went to a bakery and had them write a letter in icing on top of each one: MARRY ME, and then I mixed them up and served them on a plate. It’s a puzzle, I told her. You have to put them in order.

ARMY REM, she wrote.

Charlotte was still at the window, watching me with her arms crossed. I could barely see in her the girl I’d told to try again. I could no longer picture the look on her face when, the second time, she got it right.

Amelia

When Mom called me down to dinner that night, I moved with all the wild and crazy enthusiasm of a death row prisoner heading to an execution. I mean, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that nobody in this household was happy, and that it had something to do with the lawyer’s office we’d gone to. My parents had not done much to mask their voices when they were yelling at each other. In the three hours since Dad had left and returned again, since Mom had cried into the mixing bowl while whipping up her meat loaf, you’d been whimpering. So I did what I always did when you were in pain: I stuck my iPod headphones in my ears and cranked the volume.

I didn’t do it for the reason you’d think—to drown out the noise you were making. I knew that’s what my parents thought: that I was totally unsympathetic. I wasn’t about to try to explain it to them, either, but the truth was, I needed that music. I needed to distract myself from the fact that, when you were crying, there was nothing I could do to stop it, because that just made me hate myself even more.

Everyone—even you, in the bottom half of your spica cast, with your arm strapped up against your chest—was already sitting at the dinner table when I got there. Mom had cut your meat loaf into tiny squares, like postage stamps. It made me think of when you were little, sitting in your high chair. I used to try to play with you—rolling a ball or pulling you in a wagon—and every time I was told the same thing: Be careful.

Once, you were sitting on the bed and I was bouncing on it, and you fell off. One minute we were astronauts exploring the planet Zurgon, and the next, your left shin was bent at a ninety-degree angle and you were doing that freaky zoning-out thing you did when you had a bad break. Mom and Dad went out of their way to say this wasn’t my fault, but who did they think they were kidding? I was the one who’d been jumping, even if it had been your idea in the first place. If I’d never been there, you wouldn’t have gotten hurt.

I slid into my chair. We didn’t have assigned seats, like some families did, but we all took the same ones for every meal. I was still wearing my headphones, with my music turned up loud—emo stuff, songs that made me feel like there were people with even crappier lives than mine. “Amelia,” my father said. “Not at the table.”

Sometimes I think there’s a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that’s where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can’t help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite. And just at this moment, it chose to rear its ugly head. I blinked at my father, cranked the volume, and said—too loudly, “Pass the potatoes.”

I sounded like the biggest brat on earth, and maybe I wanted to be: like Pinocchio, if I acted like a self-centered teenager, eventually I’d become one, and everyone would notice me and cater to me instead of hand-feeding you your meat loaf and watching you to make sure you weren’t slipping in your chair. Actually, I’d just settle for having someone notice I was even a member of this family.

“Wills,” my mother said, “you have to eat something.”

“It tastes like feet,” you answered.

“Amelia, I’m not going to ask you again,” Dad said.

“Five more bites…”

“Amelia!”

They didn’t look at each other; as far as I knew they hadn’t spoken since this afternoon. I wondered if they realized that they could be on opposite sides of the globe right now, and still be having this dinner conversation, and it wouldn’t make a difference.

You squirmed away from the fork Mom was waving in front of your face. “Stop treating me like a baby,” you said. “Just because I broke my shoulder doesn’t mean you have to treat me like I’m two years old!” To illustrate this, you reached for your glass with your free arm, but you knocked it over. Milk landed in part on the tablecloth and mostly smack in the middle of Dad’s plate. “Goddammit!” he yelled, and he reached toward me and ripped the headphones out of my ears. “You’re part of this family, and you’ll act that way at the dinner table.”

I stared at him. “You first,” I said.

His face turned a steamy red. “Amelia, go to your room.”

“Fine!” I shoved my chair back with a screech and ran upstairs. With tears leaking out of my eyes and my nose running, I locked myself in the bathroom. The girl in the mirror was someone I didn’t know: her mouth twisted, her eyes dark and hollow.

These days, it seemed as if everything pissed me off. I got pissed off when I woke up in the morning and you were staring at me like I was some zoo animal; I got pissed off when I went to school and my locker was near the French classroom when Madame Riordan had made it her personal mission to make my life horrible; I got pissed off when I saw a gaggle of cheerleaders, with their perfect legs and their perfect lives, who worried about things like who would ask them to the next dance and whether red nail polish looked trampy, instead of whether their moms would remember to pick them up from school or be otherwise occupied at the emergency room. The only times I wasn’t pissed off, I was hungry—like right now. Or at least I thought it was hunger. Both felt like I was being consumed from the inside out; I couldn’t tell the difference anymore.

The last time my parents had been fighting—which was, like, yesterday—you and I were in our bedroom, and we could hear them loud and clear. Words slipped under the door, even though it was closed: wrongful birth…testimony…deposition. At one point I heard the mention of television: Don’t you think reporters would get wind of this? Is that what you really want? Dad said, and for a moment I thought how cool it would be to be on the news, until I remembered that being a poster child for dysfunctional family life wasn’t really how I wanted to spend my fifteen minutes of fame.

They’re mad at me, you said.

No. They’re mad at each other.

Then we both heard Dad say, Do you really think Willow wouldn’t figure this out?

You looked at me. Figure what out?

I hesitated, and instead of answering, I reached for the book you had in your lap and told you I’d read out loud.

Normally you didn’t like that—reading was just about the only thing you could do brilliantly, and you usually wanted to show it off, but you probably felt like I did at that moment: like there was a big Brillo pad in your stomach, and every time you moved, it grated your insides. I had friends whose parents had divorced. Wasn’t this the way it all started?

I opened to a random page of facts and began to read out loud to you about unlikely and gruesome deaths. There was a Brink’s car guard who was killed when fifty thousand dollars’ worth of quarters fell out of a truck and crushed him. A gust of wind pushed a man’s car into a river near Naples, Italy, so he broke the window and climbed out and swam to shore, only to be killed by a tree that blew over and crushed him. A man who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel in 1911 and broke nearly every bone in his body later on slipped on a banana peel in New Zealand and died from the fall.

You liked that last one best, and I’d gotten you to smile again, but inside, I was still miserable: how could anyone ever win when the world beat you down at every turn?

That was when Mom came into the room and sat down on the edge of your bed. “Do you and Daddy hate each other?” you asked.

“No, Wills,” she said, smiling, but in a way that made her skin look like it was stretched too tightly over the edges of her face. “Everything’s absolutely fine.”

I stood up, my hands on my hips. “When are you going to tell her?” I demanded.

My mother’s gaze could have cut me in half, I swear. “Amelia,” she said in a tone that brooked no argument, “there is nothing to tell.”

Now, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, I realized what a total liar my mother was. I wondered if that was what I was destined for, if you could inherit that tendency the same way she had passed me the ability to double-joint my elbows, to tie a cherry stem into a knot with my tongue.

I leaned over the toilet bowl, stuck my finger down my throat, and vomited, so that this time when I told myself I was empty and aching, I would finally be telling the truth.

Blind Baking: the process of baking a pie crust without the filling.

Sometimes, when you’re dealing with a fragile dough, it will collapse in spite of your best intentions. For this reason, some pie crusts and tart shells must be baked before the filling is added. The best method is to line the tart pan or pie plate with the rolled-out dough and place it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. When you are ready to bake, prick the crust in several spots with a fork, line the pie plate or tart shell with foil or parchment paper, and fill it with rice or dried beans. Bake as directed, then carefully remove the foil and the beans—the shell will have retained its form because of them. I like seeing how a substance that weighs heavily can, in the end, be lifted; I like the feel of the beans, like trouble that slips through your fingers. Most of all, I like the proof in the pastry: it is the things we have to bear that shape us.

SWEET PASTRY DOUGH

1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour

Pinch of salt

1 tablespoon sugar

½ cup + 2 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

1 large egg yolk

1 tablespoon ice water

In a food processor, combine the flour, salt, sugar, and butter. Pulse until coarse. In a small bowl, whisk the egg yolk and ice water. With the processor running, add the yolk mixture to the flour and butter until a ball forms. Remove the dough, wrap it in plastic, flatten to a disk, and chill for 1 hour.

Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface and place it in a tart pan with a removable bottom. Chill before baking.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Remove the tart pan from the fridge, prick the crust all over with a fork, line the shell with foil, and fill with dried beans. Bake for 17 minutes, remove the foil and beans, and continue baking for another 6 minutes. Cool completely before filling.

APRICOT TART

Sweet Pastry Dough tart shell—blind baked

2–3 apricots

2 egg yolks

1 cup heavy cream

¾ cup sugar

1½ tablespoons flour

¼ cup chopped hazelnuts

Peel the apricots, slice, and arrange in the bottom of a blind-baked tart shell.

Combine the egg yolks, cream, sugar, and flour. Pour over the apricots and sprinkle with the hazelnuts. Bake in a preheated 350 degree F oven for 35 minutes.

When you taste this one, you can still sense the heaviness left behind. It’s the shadow under the sweet, the question on the tip of your tongue.

Marin

June 2007

Facebook is supposed to be a social network, but the truth is, most people I know who use it—me included—spend so much time online tweaking our profiles and writing graffiti on other people’s walls or poking them that we never leave our computers to actually socially interact. Perhaps it was bad form to check one’s Facebook in the middle of the workday, but once, I’d walked in on Bob Ramirez tooling around with his MySpace page and I realized that there was very little he could say to me without being a hypocrite.

These days I used Facebook to join groups—Birth Mothers and Adoptees Searching, Adoption Search Registry. Some members actually found the people they were looking for. Even if that hadn’t happened to me, there was a nice comfort to logging on and reading the posts that proved I wasn’t the only one frustrated by this whole process.

I logged in and checked my mini-feed. I’d been poked by a girl from high school who’d asked me to be her friend a week ago but whom I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. I had been dared to take a quiz on Flixster by my cousin in Santa Barbara. I’d been voted by my other friends as the person you’d most prefer to be stuck in handcuffs with.

I glanced at the information just above this, my profile.

NAME: Marin Gates

NETWORKS: Portsmouth, NH / UNH Alumni / NH Bar Association

SEX: Female

INTERESTED IN: Men

RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Single

Single?

I reloaded the page. For the past four months on my Facebook page that line had read: In a relationship with Joe McIntyre. I clicked on the home page and scrolled through the news feed. There it was: a picture of his face and a status update: Joe McIntyre and Marin Gates have ended their relationship.

My jaw dropped open; I felt like I’d been sucker-punched.

I grabbed my coat and stormed into the reception area. “Wait!” Briony said. “Where are you going? You’ve got a conference call at—”

“Reschedule it,” I snapped. “My boyfriend just dumped me via Facebook.”

It was not like Joe McIntyre was the One. I’d met him at a Bruins game with clients; he passed me in the aisle and spilled his beer down the front of my shirt. Not an auspicious beginning, but he had indigo eyes and a smile that contributed to global warming, and before I knew it, I’d not only promised that he could pay my dry-cleaning bill but also given him my phone number. On our first date, we found out that we worked less than a block away from each other—he was an environmental lawyer—and that we’d both graduated from UNH. On our second date, we went back to my place and didn’t get out of bed for two straight days.

Joe was six years younger than me, which meant that at twenty-eight he was still playing the field and that at thirty-four I had traded in my wristwatch for a biological clock. I expected this fling to be a little fun: someone to go to a movie with on a Saturday night and get flowers from on Valentine’s Day. I wasn’t banking on forever; I fully figured that I would tell him sometime in the next few months that we were looking for different things in our lives right now.

But I sure as hell wouldn’t have broken the news to him on Facebook.

I strode around the corner and walked into the reception area of the law firm where he worked. It was much less grandiose than Bob’s, but then again, we were a plaintiff’s attorney, we weren’t trying to save the world. The receptionist smiled. “Can I help you?”

“Joe’s expecting me,” I said, and I headed down the hall.

When I opened the door to his office, he was dictating into a digital recorder. “Furthermore, we believe it’s in the best interests of Cochran and Sons to—Marin? What are you doing here?”

“You broke up with me on Facebook?”

“I was going to send a text, but I thought that would be worse,” Joe said, jumping up to close the door as a colleague wandered by. “C’mon, Marin. You know I’m not good at the touchy-feely stuff.” Then he grinned. “Well, the metaphorical touchy-feely stuff…”

“You are such an insensitive troll,” I said.

“This was a lot more civilized, if you ask me. What was the alternative? Some big argument where you tell me to fuck off and die?”

“Yes!” I said, and then I took a deep breath. “Is there someone else?”

“There’s something else,” Joe said soberly. “For God’s sake, Marin. You’ve blown me off the past three times I’ve tried to get together. What did you expect me to do? Just sit around waiting for you to have time for me?”

“That’s not fair,” I said. “I was reading marriage license applications—”

“Exactly,” Joe replied. “You don’t want to go out with me. You want to go out with your birth mother. Look, at first, I thought it was kind of hot—you know, you were so passionate when you talked about finding her. Except it turns out you’re not passionate about anything but that, Marin.” He slid his hands into his pockets. “You’re so busy living in the past, you’ve got nothing to give right now.”

I could feel my neck heating up beneath the collar of my suit. “Do you remember those two amazing days—and nights—at my house?” I said, leaning toward him until we were a breath away. I watched his pupils dilate.

“Oh yeah,” he murmured.

“I faked it. Every time,” I said, and I walked out of Joe’s office with my head high.

My birthday is January 3, 1973. I’ve known this, obviously, my whole life. The adoption decree I’d gotten from Hillsborough County was dated in late July, because of the six-month waiting period to finalize an adoption and the time it takes to schedule the hearing. There’s a lot of debate about that six-month period, in the adoptive community. Some people feel it should be longer, to give the birth mom time to change her mind; some people feel it should be shorter, to give the adoptive parents peace of mind that their newborn won’t be taken away. Where you fall on the spectrum, of course, depends on whether you have a baby to give away or one to receive.

I was a few days late. My father used to say that he was counting on me being his little tax deduction, but then I foiled that by arriving in the new year. On the slip of paper that came home from the hospital with me, saved in my baby book, was a bassinet card with my name torn off—but I could still make out a loop in the middle of the last name that hadn’t been ripped away: a cursive y or g or j or q. I knew this about my former self, and I knew that my birth parents had lived in Hillsborough County, and that my mother had been seventeen. In the seventies, there was still a good chance that a seventeen-year-old would marry the father of her baby, and that had led me to the records room.

Using a due date calculator on a pregnancy website, I figured out that I must have been conceived sometime around April tenth in order to be due on New Year’s Eve. (April tenth. A high school spring formal dance, I imagined. A midnight car ride to the shore. The waves on the sand, the sun breaking like a yolk over the ocean at dawn, he and she, sleeping in each other’s arms.) At any rate, if she found out she was pregnant a month later, that meant getting married in the early summer of 1972.

In 1972, Nixon went to China. Eleven Israeli athletes were killed at the Munich Olympic games. A stamp cost eight cents. The Oakland A’s won the World Series, and M*A*S*H premiered on CBS.

On January 22, 1973, nineteen days after I was born and living with the Gates family, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade.

Did my mother hear about that and curse her bad timing?

A few weeks ago I had started scouring the records of Hillsborough County for marriage certificates from the summer of 1972. If my mother was seventeen, there must have been a parental consent form attached, too. Surely that would limit the numbers I had to wade through.

I had blown Joe off for two consecutive weekends while I waded through over three thousand marriage certificate applications, and learned incredibly creepy things about my home state (like that a girl between thirteen and seventeen, and a boy between fourteen and seventeen, could marry with parental consent), and yet, I didn’t find an application that looked like it might belong to my birth parents.

The truth is, even before Joe dumped me, I had resigned myself to giving up my search.

I went back to work after I left his office, and somehow phoned in a performance the rest of the day. That night, I came back to my house, opened a bottle of wine and a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, and faced the truth: I had to decide if I really wanted to find my birth mother. Presumably, she had gone through significant moral contortions deciding whether or not to give me up; surely I owed her the same self-assessment in deciding whether or not to find her. Curiosity wasn’t good enough; neither was a medical scare that had left me wondering about my origins. Once I had a name: then what? Knowing where I came from did not necessarily mean I was brave enough to hear why I had been given away. If I was going to do this, I was going to be opening the door for a relationship that would change both of our lives.

I reached for the phone and dialed my mother. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Trying to figure out how to TiVo The Colbert Report,” she said. “What are you doing?”

I glanced down at the melting ice cream, the half-empty bottle of wine. “Embarking on a liquid diet,” I said. “And you have to push the red button to get the right menu on the screen.”

“Oh, there it is. Good. Your father gets cranky when I watch the show and he falls asleep.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Am I passionate?”

She laughed. “Things must be really bad if you’re asking me that.”

“I don’t mean romantically. I mean, you know, about life. Did I have hobbies when I was little? Did I collect Garbage Pail Kids cards or beg to be on a swim team?”

“Honey, you were terrified of the water till you were twelve.”

“Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best example.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Did I stick with things, even when they were hard? Or did I just give up?”

“Why? Did something happen at work?”

“No, not at work.” I hesitated. “If you were me, would you look for your birth parents?”

There was a bubble of silence. “Wow. That’s a pretty loaded question. And I thought we’d already had this discussion. I said that I’d support you—”

“I know what you said. But doesn’t it hurt you?” I asked bluntly.

“I’m not going to lie, Marin. When you first started asking questions, it did. I guess a part of me felt like, if you loved me enough, you wouldn’t need to find any other answers. But then you had the whole scare at the gynecologist’s, and I realized this wasn’t about me. It was about you.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m old and tough.”

That made me smile. “You’re not old, and you’re a softy.” I drew in my breath. “I just keep thinking, you know, this is a really big deal. You dig up the box, and maybe you find buried treasure, but maybe you find something rotting.”

“Maybe the person you’re afraid of hurting is yourself.”

Leave it to my mother to hit the nail on the head. What if, for example, I turned out to be related to Jeffrey Dahmer or Jesse Helms? Wouldn’t that be information I’d be better off not knowing?