r. Alexander,” the judge warns.

“And if Sara fits the psychological profile of a closely related donor personality who can't make independent decisions, then why is she any more capable of making this choice than Anna?”

From the corner of my eye, I can see Sara's stunned face. I can hear the judge banging his gavel. “You're right, Dr. Neaux—parents need to be parents,” I say. “But sometimes that isn't good enough.”

 

JULIA

JUDGE DESALVO CALLS for a ten-minute break. I put down my knapsack, a Guatemalan weave, and start washing my hands when the door to one of the bathroom stalls opens. Anna comes out, hesitating for just a moment. Then she turns on the tap beside me.

“Hey,” I say.

Anna goes to dry her hands under the blower. The air doesn't feed out, not reading the sensor of her palm for some reason. She waves her fingers beneath the machine again, then stares at them, as if trying to make sure that she's not invisible. She bangs on the metal.

When I lean over and wave a hand beneath it, hot air breathes into my palm. We share this small warmth, hobos around a kettle-bellied fire. “Campbell tells me you don't want to testify.”

“I don't really want to talk about it,” Anna says.

“Well, sometimes to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least.”

She leans against the bathroom wall and crosses her arms. “Who died and made you Confucius?” Anna turns away, then reaches down to pick up my knapsack for me. “I like this. All the colors.”

I take it and slip it over my shoulder. “I saw old women weaving them, when I was in South America. It takes twenty spools of thread to make this pattern.”

“Truth's like that,” Anna says, or it's what I think she says, but by then she has left the room.

I am watching Campbell's hands. They move around a lot while he is talking; he almost seems to use them to punctuate whatever he's saying. But they're trembling a little, too, and I attribute this to the fact that he doesn't know what I'm going to say. “As the guardian ad litem,” he asks, “what are your recommendations in this case?”

I take a deep breath and look at Anna. “What I see here is a young woman who has spent her life feeling an enormous responsibility for her sister's well-being. In fact, she knows she was brought into this world to carry that responsibility.” I glance at Sara, sitting at her table. “I think that this family, when they conceived Anna, had the best of intentions. They wanted to save their older daughter; they believed Anna would be a welcome addition to the family—not just because of what she would provide genetically, but also because they wanted to love her and watch her grow up well.”

Then I turn to Campbell. “I also understand completely how, in this family, it became critical to do anything that was humanly possible to save Kate. When you love someone, you'll do anything you can to keep them with you.”

As a little girl, I used to wake up in the middle of the night remembering my wildest dreams—I was flying; I was locked in a chocolate factory; I was queen of a Caribbean isle. I would wake with the smell of frangipani in my hair or clouds caught in the hem of my nightgown until I realized that I was somewhere different. And no matter how hard I tried, I might fall asleep again but I could not will myself back into the fabric of that dream I'd been having.

Once, during the night Campbell and I spent together, I woke up in his arms to find him still sleeping. I traced the geography of his face: from the cliff of his cheekbone to the whirlpool of his ear to the laugh lines ravined beside his mouth. Then I closed my eyes and for the first time in my life fell right back into the dream, in the very spot where I'd left it.

“Unfortunately,” I say to the Court, “there is also a point when you have to step back and say that it's time to let go.”

For a month after Campbell dumped me, I did not get out of bed except when forced to go to Mass or to sit at the dinner table. I stopped washing my hair. Under my eyes were dark circles. Izzy and I, at very first glance, looked completely different.

On the day that I mustered the courage to get out of bed of my own volition, I went to Wheeler and trolled around the boathouse, carefully staying hidden until I found a boy on the sailing team—a summer session student—who was taking out one of the school's skiffs. He had blond hair, instead of Campbell's black. He was stocky, not tall and lean. I pretended I needed a ride home.

Within an hour I had fucked him in the backseat of his Honda.

I did it because if there was, someone else, then I wouldn't smell Campbell on my skin and taste him on the inside of my lips. I did it because I had been feeling so hollow inside that I feared floating away, like a helium balloon that rose so high you couldn't even see the faintest splash of color.

I felt this boy whose name I couldn't be bothered to remember grunting and heaving inside me; I was that empty and that far away. And suddenly I knew what became of all those lost balloons: they were the loves that slipped out of our fists; the blank eyes that rose in every night sky.

“When I first was given this assignment two weeks ago,” I tell the judge, “and I started to look at the dynamics of this family, it seemed to me that medical emancipation was in Anna's best interests. But then I realized I was guilty of making judgments the way everyone else in this family does—based solely on physiological effects, instead of psychological ones. The easy part of this decision is to figure out what's medically right for Anna. Bottom line: it is not in her best interests to donate organs and blood that has no medical benefit for Anna herself but prolongs her sister's life.”

I see Campbell's eyes spark; this endorsement has surprised him. “It's harder to come up with a solution, though—because although it may not be in Anna's best interests to be a donor for her sister, her own family is incapable of making informed decisions about that. If Kate's illness is a runaway train, then everyone reacts from crisis to crisis without figuring out the best way to bring this into the station. And using the same analogy, her parents' pressure is a switch on the track—Anna isn't mentally or physically strong enough to guide her own decisions, knowing what their wishes are.”

Campbell's dog gets up and begins to whine. Distracted, I turn to the noise. Campbell pushes away Judge's snout, never taking his eyes off me.

“I see no one in the Fitzgerald family who can make unbiased decisions about Anna's health care,” I admit. “Not her parents, and not Anna herself.”

Judge DeSalvo frowns down at me. “Then Ms. Romano,” he asks, “what's your recommendation to the court?”

 

CAMPBELL

SHE'S NOT GOING TO VETO the petition.

That's my first incredible thought—that my case isn't going down in flames yet, even after Julia's testimony. My second thought is that Julia is as ripped up about this case and what it's done to Anna as I am, except she's put it out there on display for everyone to see.

Judge has chosen this moment to become a colossal pain in the ass. He sinks his teeth into my coat and starts tugging, but I'll be damned if I'm going to break before I hear Julia finish.

“Ms. Romano,” DeSalvo asks, “what's your recommendation to the court?”

“I don't know,” she says softly. “I'm sorry. This is the first time I've ever served as a guardian ad litem and been unable to reach a recommendation, and I know that's not acceptable. But on one hand I have Brian and Sara Fitzgerald, who have done nothing but make choices throughout the course of both their daughters' lives out of love. Put that way, they certainly don't seem like the wrong decisions—even if they aren't the right decisions for both of those daughters anymore.”

She turns to Anna, and beside me I can feel her sit a little straighter, prouder. “On the other hand, I have Anna, who after thirteen years is standing up for herself—even though it may mean losing the sister she loves.” Julia shakes her head. “It's a Solomon's choice, Your Honor. But you're not asking me to split a baby in half. You're asking me to split a family.”

When I feel a tug on my other arm I start to slap the dog away again, but then realize that this time, it's Anna. “Okay,” she whispers.

Judge DeSalvo excuses Julia from the stand. “Okay what?” I whisper back.

“Okay I'll talk,” Anna says.

I stare at her in disbelief. Judge is whining now, and batting his nose against my thigh, but I can't risk a recess. All it will take for Anna to change her mind is a split second. “You sure?”

But she doesn't answer me. She stands up, drawing all attention in the courtroom to herself. “Judge DeSalvo?” Anna takes a deep breath. “I have something to say.”

 

ANNA

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT the first time I had to give an oral report in class: it was third grade, and I was in charge of talking about the kangaroo. They're pretty interesting, you know. I mean, not only are they found on Australia alone, like some kind of mutant evolutionary strain—they have the eyes of deer and the useless paws of a T. Rex. But the most fascinating thing about them is the pouch, of course. This baby, when it gets born, is like the size of a germ and manages to crawl under the flap and tuck itself inside, all while its clueless mother is bouncing around the Outback. And that pouch isn't like they make it out on Saturday morning cartoons—it's pink and wrinkled like inside your lip, and full of important motherish plumbing. I'll bet you didn't know kangaroos don't just carry one joey at a time. Every now and then there will be a miniature sibling, tiny and jellied and stuck in the bottom while her older sister scrapes around with enormous feet and makes herself comfortable.

As you can see, I clearly knew my stuff. But when it was nearly my turn, just as Stephen Scarpinio was holding up a papier-mache model of a lemur, I knew that I was going to be sick. I went up to Mrs. Cuthbert, and told her if I stayed to do this assignment, no one was going to be happy.

“Anna,” she said, “if you tell yourself you feel fine, you will.” So when Stephen finished, I got up. I took a deep breath. “Kangaroos,” I said, “are marsupials that live only in Australia.”

Then I projectile vomited over four kids who had the bad luck to be sitting in the front row.

For the whole rest of the year, I was called KangaRalph. Every now and then some kid would go on a plane on vacation, and I'd go to my cubby to find a barf bag pinned to the front of my fleece pullover, a makeshift marsupial pouch. I was the school's greatest embarrassment until Darren Hong went to capture the flag in gym and accidentally pulled down Oriana Bertheim's skirt.

I'm telling you this to explain my general aversion to public speaking.

But now, on the witness stand, there's even more to be worried about. It's not that I'm nervous, like Campbell thinks. I am not afraid of clamming up, either. I'm afraid of saying too much.

I look out at the courtroom and see my mother, sitting at her lawyer table, and at my father, who smiles at me just the tiniest bit. And suddenly I can't believe I ever thought I might be able to go through with this. I get to the edge of my seat, ready to apologize for wasting everyone's time and bolt—only to realize that Campbell looks positively awful. He's sweating, and his pupils are so big they look like quarters set deep in his face. “Anna,” Campbell asks, “do you want a glass of water?”

I look at him and think, Do you?

What I want is to go home. I want to run away to a place where no one knows my name and pretend to be a millionaire's adopted daughter, the heir to a toothpaste manufacturing kingdom, a Japanese pop star.

Campbell turns to the judge. “May I confer for a moment with my client?”

“Be my guest,” Judge DeSalvo says.

So Campbell walks up to the witness stand and leans so close that only I can hear him. “When I was a kid I had a friend named Joseph Balz,” he whispers. “Imagine if Dr. Neaux had married him.”

He backs away while I am still smiling, and thinking that maybe, just maybe, I can last for another two or three minutes up here.

Campbell's dog is going crazy—he's the one who needs water or something, from the looks of it. And I'm not the only one to notice. “Mr. Alexander,” Judge DeSalvo says, “please control your animal.”

“No, Judge.”

“Excuse me?!”

Campbell goes tomato red. “I was speaking to the dog, Your Honor, like you asked.” Then he turns to me. “Anna, why did you want to file this petition?”

A lie, as you probably know, has a taste all its own. Blocky and bitter and never quite right, like when you pop a piece of fancy chocolate into your mouth expecting toffee filling and you get lemon zest instead. “She asked,” I say, the first two words that will become an avalanche.

“Who asked what?”

“My mom,” I say, staring at Campbell's shoes. “For a kidney.” I look down at my skirt, pick at a thread. Just maybe I will unravel the whole thing.

About two months ago, Kate was diagnosed with kidney failure. She got tired easily, and lost weight, and retained water, and threw up a lot. The blame was pinned to a bunch of different things: genetic abnormalities, granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor—growth hormone shots Kate had once taken to boost marrow production, stress from other treatments. She was put on dialysis to get rid of the toxins zipping around her bloodstream. And then, the dialysis stopped working.

One night, my mother came into our room when Kate and I were just hanging out. She had my father with her, which meant we were in for a more heavy discussion than who-left-the-sink-running-by-accident. “I've been doing some reading on the internet,” my mother said. “Transplants of typical organs aren't nearly as difficult to recover from as bone marrow transplants.”

Kate looked at me and popped in a new CD. We both knew where this was headed. “You can't exactly pick up a kidney at Kmart.”

“I know. It turns out that you only need to match a couple of HLA proteins to be a kidney donor—not all six. I called Dr. Chance to ask if I might be a match for you, and he said in normal cases, I probably would.”

Kate hears the right word. “Normal cases?”

“Which you're not. Dr. Chance thinks you'd reject an organ from the general donor pool, just because your body has already been through so much.” My mother looked down at the carpet. “He won't recommend the procedure unless the kidney comes from Anna.”

My father shook his head. “That's invasive surgery,” he said quietly. “For both of them.”

I started thinking about this. Would I have to be in the hospital? Would it hurt? Could people live with just one kidney?

What if I wound up with kidney failure when I was, like, seventy? Where would I get my spare?

Before I could ask any of this, Kate spoke. “I'm not doing it again, all right? I'm sick of it. The hospitals and the chemo and the radiation and the whole freaking thing. Just leave me alone, will you?”

My mother's face went white. “Fine, Kate. Go ahead and commit suicide!”

She put her headphones on again, turned the music up so loud that I could hear it. “It's not suicide,” she said, “if you're already dying.”

“Did you ever tell anyone that you didn't want to be a donor?” Campbell asks me, as his dog starts doing helicopters in the front of the courtroom.

“Mr. Alexander,” Judge DeSalvo says, “I'm going to call a bailiff to remove your… pet.”

It's true, the dog is totally out of control. He's barking and leaping up with his front paws on Campbell and running in those tight circles. Campbell ignores both Judges. "Anna, did you decide to file this lawsuit all by yourself?'

I know why he's asking; he wants everyone to know I'm capable of making choices that are hard. And I even have my lie, quivering like the

snake it is, caught between my teeth. But what I mean to say isn't quite what slips out. “I was kind of convinced by someone.”

This is, of course, news to my parents, whose eyes hammer onto me. It's news to Julia, who actually makes a small sound. And it's news to Campbell, who runs a hand down his face in defeat. This is exactly why it's better to stay silent; there is less of a chance of screwing up your life and everyone else's.

“Anna,” Campbell says, “who convinced you?”

I am small in this seat, in this state, on this lonely planet. I fold my hands together, holding between them the only emotion I've managed to keep from slipping away: regret. “Kate.”

The entire courtroom goes silent. Before I can say anything else, the lightning bolt I have been expecting strikes. I cringe, but it turns out that the crash I've heard isn't the earth opening up to swallow me whole. It is Campbell, who's fallen to the floor, while his dog stands nearby with a very human look on his face that says / told you so.

 

BRIAN

IF YOU TRAVEL IN SPACE for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense. I thought I had been listening to Jesse, but it turns out I haven't been listening to him at all. I have listened carefully to Anna, and yet it seems there is a piece missing. I try to work through the few things she has said, tracing them and trying to make sense of them the way the Greeks somehow found five points in the sky and decided it looked like a woman's body.

Then it hits me-l am looking in the wrong place. The Aboriginal people of Australia, for example, look between the constellations of the Greeks and the Romans into the black wash of sky, and find an emu hiding under the Southern Cross where there are no stars. There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots as there are in the bright ones.

Or this is what I'm thinking, anyway, when my daughter's lawyer falls to the floor in the throes of an epileptic seizure.

Airway, breathing, circulation. Airway, for someone having a grand mal seizure, is the biggie. I jump over the gate of the gallery and have to fight the dog out of the way; he's come to stand over Campbell Alexander's twitching body like a sentry. The attorney enters the tonic phase with a cry, as air is forced out by the contraction of his breathing muscles. He lays rigid on the ground. Then the clonic phase starts, and his muscles fire randomly, repeatedly. I turn him on his side, in case he vomits, and start looking for something to stick between his jaws so that he won't bite off his own tongue, when the most amazing thing happens-that dog knocks over Alexander's briefcase and pulls out something that looks like a rubber bone but is actually a bite block, and drops it into my hand. Distantly I am aware of the judge sealing off the courtroom. I yell to Vern to call for an ambulance.

Julia is at my side immediately. “Is he all right?”

“He's gonna be fine. It's a seizure.”

She looks like she's on the verge of tears. “Can't you do something?”

“Wait,” I say.

She reaches for Campbell, but I draw her hand away. “I don't understand why it happened.”

I don't know if Campbell does, himself. I do know that there are some things, though, that occur without a direct line of antecedents.

Two thousand years ago the night sky looked completely different, and so when you get right down to it, the Greek conceptions of star signs as related to birth dates are grossly inaccurate for today's day and age. It's called the Line of Procession: back then the sun didn't set in Taurus, but in Gemini. A September 24 birthday didn't mean you were a Libra, but a Virgo. And there was a thirteenth zodiac constellation, Ophiuchus the Serpent Bearer, which rose between Sagittarius and Scorpio for only four days.

The reason it's all off kilter? The earth's axis wobbles. Life isn't nearly as stable as we want it to be.

Campbell Alexander vomits on the courtroom rug, then coughs his way to consciousness in the judge's chambers. 'Take it easy,“ I say, helping him sit. ”You had a bad one."

He holds his head. “What happened?”

Amnesia, on both sides of the event, is pretty common. “Blacked out. Looked like a grand mal to me.”

He glances down at the IV line Caesar and I have placed. “I don't need that.”

“Like hell you don't,” I say. “If you don't take antiseizure meds, you'll be back on that floor in no time.”

Relenting, he leans back against the couch and stares at the ceiling. “How bad was it?”

“Pretty bad,” I admit.

He pats Judge on the head-the dog's been inseparable. “Good boy. Sorry I didn't listen.” Then he looks down at his pants—wet and reeking, another common effect of a grand mal. “Shit.”

“Close enough.” I hand him a spare pair from one of my uniforms, something I had the department bring along. “You need help?”

He shakes me off and tries, one-handedly, to take off his trousers. Without a word I reach over and undo the fly, help him change. I do this without thinking, the way I'd lift up the shirt of a woman who needed CPR; but all the same, I know it's killing him.

“Thanks,” he says, taking great care to zip his own fly. We sit for a second. “Does the judge know?” When I don't answer, Campbell buries his face in his hands. “Christ. Right in front of everyone?”

“How long have you hidden it?”

“Since it started. I was eighteen. I got into a car crash, and they started up after that.”

“Head trauma?”

He nods. 'That's what they said."

I clasp my hands together between my knees. “Anna was pretty freaked out.”

Campbell rubs his forehead. “She was… testifying.”

“Yeah,” I say. 'Yeah."

He looks up at me. “I have to get back in there.”

“Not yet.” At the sound of Julia's voice, we both turn. She stands in the doorway, staring at Campbell as if she has never seen him before, and I suppose in all fairness she hasn't, not like this.

“I'll, uh, go see if the boys have filed their report yet,” I murmur, and I leave them.

Things don't always look as they seem. Some stars, for example, look like bright pinholes, but when you get them pegged under a microscope you find you're looking at a globular cluster—a million stars that, to us, presents as a single entity. On a less dramatic note there are triples, like Alpha Centauri, which up close turns out to be a double star and a red dwarf in close proximity.

There's an indigenous tribe in Africa that tells of life coming from the second star in Alpha Centauri, the one no one can see without a high-powered observatory telescope. Come to think of it, the Greeks, the Aboriginals, and the Plains Indians all lived continents apart and all, independently, looked at the same septuplet knot of the Pleiades and believed them to be seven young girls running away from something that threatened to hurt them.

Make of it what you will.

 

CAMPBELL

THE ONLY THING COMPARABLE to the aftermath of a grand mal seizure is waking up on the pavement with a hangover from the mother of all frat parties and immediately being run over by a truck. On second thought, maybe a grand mal is worse. I am covered in my own filth, hooked up to medicine and falling apart at the seams, when Julia walks toward me. “It's a seizure dog,” I say.

“No kidding.” Julia holds out her hand for Judge to sniff. She points to the couch beside me. “Can I sit down?”

“It's not catching, if that's what you mean.”

“It wasn't.” Julia comes close enough that I can feel the heat from her shoulder, inches away from mine. “Why didn't you tell me, Campbell?”

“Christ, Julia, I didn't even tell my parents.” I try to look over her shoulder into the hallway. “Where's Anna?”

“How long has this been going on?”

I try to get up, and manage to lift myself a half inch before my strength gives out. “ I have to get back in there.”

“Campbell.”

I sigh. “A while.”

“A while, as in a week?”

Shaking my head, I say, “A while, as in two days before we graduated from Wheeler.” I look up at her. “The day I took you home, all I wanted was to be with you. When my parents told me I had to got o that stupid dinner at the country club, I followed them in my own car, so I could make a quick escape—I was planning on driving back to your house, that night. But on the way to dinner, I got into a car accident. I came through with a few bruises, and that night, I had the first seizure. Thirty CT scans later, the doctors still couldn't really tell me why, but they made it pretty clear I'd have to live with it forever.” I take a deep breath. “Which is what made me realize that no one else should have to.”

“What?”

“What do you want me to say, Julia? I wasn't good enough for you. You deserved better than some freak who might fall down frothing at the mouth any old minute.”

Julia goes perfectly still. “You might have let me make up my own mind.”

“What difference would it have made? Like you really would have gotten great satisfaction guarding me like Judge does when it happens; wiping up after me, living at the end of my life.” I shake my head. “You were so incredibly independent. A free spirit. I didn't want to be the one who took that away from you.”

“Well, if I'd had the choice, maybe I wouldn't have spent the past fifteen years thinking there was something the matter with me.”

“You?” I start to laugh. “Look at you. You're a knockout. You're smarter than I am. You're on a career track and you're family-centered and you probably even can balance your checkbook.”

“And I'm lonely, Campbell,” Julia adds. “Why do you think I had to learn to act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has its own zip code. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when I've got PMS. You don't love someone because they're perfect,” she says. “You love them in spite of the fact that they're not.”

I don't know how to respond to that; it's like being told after thirty-five years that the sky, which I've seen as a brilliant blue, is in fact rather green.

“And another thing—this time, you don't get to leave me. I'm going to leave you.”

If possible, that only makes me feel worse. I try to pretend it doesn't hurt, but I don't have the energy. “So go.”

Julia settles next to me. “I will,” she says. “In another fifty or sixty years.”

 

ANNA

I KNOCK ON THE DOOR of the men's room, and then walk inside. On one wall is a really long, gross urinal. On the other, washing his hands in a sink, is Campbell. He's wearing a pair of my dad's uniform pants. He looks different now, as if all the straight lines that had been used to draw his face have been smudged. “Julia said you wanted me to come in here,” I say.

“Yeah, I wanted to talk to you alone, and all the conference rooms are upstairs. Your dad doesn't think I ought to tackle that just yet.” He wipes his hands on a towel. “I'm sorry about what happened.”

Well, I don't even know if there's a decent answer to that. I chew on my lower lip. “Is that why I couldn't pat the dog?”

“Yeah.”

“How does Judge know what to do?”

Campbell shrugs. “It's supposed to have something to do with scent or electrical impulses that an animal can sense before a human can. But I think it's because we know each other so well.” He pats Judge on the neck. “He gets me somewhere safe before it happens. I usually have about twenty minutes' lead time.”

“Huh.” I am suddenly shy. I've been with Kate when she's really, really sick, but this is different. I hadn't been expecting this from Campbell. “Is this why you took my case?”

“So that I could have a seizure in public? Believe me, no.”

“Not that.” I look away from him. “Because you know what it's like to not have any control over your body.”

“Maybe,” Campbell says thoughtfully. “But my doorknobs did sorely need polishing.”

If he's trying to make me feel better, he's failing miserably. “I told you having me testify wasn't the greatest idea.”

He puts his hands on my shoulders. “Anna, come on. If I can go back in there after that performance, you sure as hell can climb into the hot seat for a few more questions.”

How am I supposed to fight that logic? So I follow Campbell back into the courtroom, where nothing is the way it was just an hour ago. With everyone watching him like he's a ticking bomb, Campbell walks up to the bench and turns to the court in general. “I'm very sorry about that, Judge,” he says. “Anything for a ten-minute break, right?”

How can he make jokes about something like this? And then I realize: it's what Kate does, too. Maybe if God gives you a handicap, he makes sure you've got a few extra doses of humor to take the edge off.

“Why don't you take the rest of the day, Counselor,” Judge DeSalvo offers.

“No, I'm all right now. And I think it's important that we get to the bottom of this.” He turns to the court reporter. “Could you, uh, refresh my memory?”

She reads back the transcript, and Campbell nods, but he acts like he's hearing my words, regurgitated, for the very first time. “All right, Anna, you were saying Kate asked you to file this lawsuit for medical emancipation?”

Again, I squirm. “Not quite.”

“Can you explain?”

“She didn't ask me to file the lawsuit.”

“Then what did she ask you?”

I steal a glance at my mother. She knows; she has to know. Don't make me say it out loud.

“Anna,” Campbell presses, “what did she ask you?”

I shake my head, tight-lipped, and Judge DeSalvo leans over. “Anna, you're going to have to give us an answer to this question.”

“Fine.” The truth bursts out of me; a raging river, now that the dam's washed away. “She asked me to kill her.”

The first thing that was wrong was that Kate had locked the door to our bedroom, when there wasn't really a lock, which meant she'd either pushed up furniture or pennied it shut. “Kate,” I yelled, banging, because I was sweaty and gross from hockey practice and I wanted to take a shower and change. “Kate, this isn't fair.”

I guess I made enough noise, because she opened up. And that was the second thing: there was something just wrong about the room. I glanced around, but everything seemed to be in place—most importantly, none of my stuff had been messed with—and yet Kate still looked like she'd swilled a mystery.

“What's your problem?” I asked, and then I went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and smelled it—sweet and almost angry, the same boozy scent I associated with Jesse's apartment. I started opening up cabinets and rummaging through towels and trying to find the proof, no pun intended, and sure enough there was a half-empty bottle of whiskey hidden behind the boxes of tampons.

“Looky here…” I said, brandishing it and walking back into the bedroom, thinking I had a great little wedge of blackmail to use to my advantage for a while, and then I saw Kate holding the pills.

“What are you doing?”

Kate rolled over. “Leave me alone, Anna.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No,” Kate said. “I'm just sick of waiting for something that's going to happen anyway. I think I've fucked up everyone's life long enough, don't you?”

“But everyone's worked so hard just to keep you alive. You can't kill yourself.”

All of a sudden Kate started to cry. “I know. I can't.” It took me a few moments to realize this meant she'd already tried before.

My mother gets up slowly. “It's not true,” she says, her voice stretched thin as glass. “Anna, I don't know why you'd say that.”

My eyes fill up. “Why would I make it up?”

She walks closer. “Maybe you misunderstood. Maybe she was just having a bad day, or being dramatic.” She smiles in the pained way of people who really want to cry. “Because if she was that upset, she would have told me.”

“She couldn't tell you,” I reply. “She was too afraid if she killed herself she'd be killing you, too.” I cannot catch my breath. I am sinking in a tar pit; I am running and the ground's gone beneath my feet. Campbell asks the judge for a few minutes so that I can pull myself together, but even if Judge DeSalvo answers, I am crying so hard I don't hear it. “I don't want her to die, but I know she doesn't want to live like this, and I'm the one who can give her what she wants.” I keep my eyes on my mother, even as she swims away from me. “I've always been the one who can give her what she wants.”

The next time it came up was after my mother came into our room to talk about donating a kidney. “Don't do it,” Kate said, when they were gone.

I glanced at her. “What are you talking about? Of course I'm going to do it.”

We were getting undressed, and I noticed that we had picked the same pajamas—shiny satin ones printed with cherries. As we slid into bed I thought we looked like we did as little kids, when our parents would dress us similarly because they thought it was cute.

“Do you think it would work?” I asked. “A kidney transplant?”

Kate looked at me. “It might.” She leaned over, her hand on the light switch. “Don't do it,” she repeated, and it wasn't until I heard her a second time that I understood what she was really saying.

My mother is a breath away from me, and in her eyes are all the mistakes she's ever made. My father comes up and puts his arm around her shoulders. “Come sit down,” he whispers into her hair.

“Your Honor,” Campbell says, getting to his feet. “May I?”

He walks toward me, Judge right beside him. I am just as shaky as he is. I think about that dog an hour ago. How did he know for sure what Campbell really needed, and when?

“Anna, do you love your sister?”

“Of course.”

“But you were willing to take an action that might kill her?”

Something flashes inside me. “It was so she wouldn't have to go through this anymore. I thought it was what she wanted.”

He goes silent; and I realize at that moment: he knows.

Inside me, something breaks. “It was… it was what I wanted, too.”

We were in the kitchen, washing and drying the dishes. “You hate going to the hospital,” Kate said.

“Well, duh.” I put the forks and spoons, clean, back into their drawer.

“I know you'd do anything to not have to go there anymore.”

I glanced at her. “Sure. Because you'd be healthy.”

“Or dead.” Kate plunged her hands into the soapy water, careful not to look at me. “Think about it, Anna. You could go to your hockey camps. You could choose a college in a whole different country. You could do anything you want and never have to worry about me.”

She pulled these examples right out of my head, and I could feel myself blushing, ashamed that they were even up there to be drawn out into the open. If Kate was feeling guilty about being a burden, then I was feeling twice as guilty for knowing she felt that way. For knowing I felt that way.

We didn't talk after that. I dried whatever she handed me, and we both tried to pretend we didn't know the truth: that in addition to the piece of me that's always wanted Kate to live, there's another, horrible piece of me that sometimes wishes I were free.

There, they understand: I am a monster. I started this lawsuit for some reasons I'm proud of and many I'm not. And now Campbell will see why I couldn't be a witness—not because I was scared to talk in front of everyone—but because of all these terrible feelings, some of which are too awful to speak out loud. That I want Kate alive, but also want to be myself, not part of her. That I want the chance to grow up, even if Kate can't. That Kate's death would be the worst thing that's ever happened to me… and also the best.

That sometimes, when I think about all this, I hate myself and just want to crawl back to where I was, to the person they want me to be.

Now the whole courtroom is looking at me, and I'm sure that the witness stand or my skin or maybe both is about to implode. Under this magnifying glass, you can see right down to the rotten core at the heart of me. Maybe if they keep staring at me, I will go up in blue, bitter smoke. Maybe I will disappear without a trace.

“Anna,” Campbell says quietly, “what made you think that Kate wanted to die?”

“She said she was ready.”

He walks up until he is standing right in front of me. “Isn't it possible that's the same reason she asked you to help her?”

I look up slowly, and unwrap this gift Campbell's just handed me. What if Kate wanted to die, so that I could live? What if after all these years of saving Kate, she was only trying to do the same for me? “Did you tell Kate you were going to stop being a donor?”

“Yes,” I whisper.

“When?”

“The night before I hired you.”

“Anna, what did Kate say?”

Until now, I hadn't really thought about it, but Campbell has triggered the memory. My sister had gotten very quiet, so quiet that I wondered if she'd fallen asleep. And then she turned to me with all the world in her eyes, and a smile that crumbled like a fault line.

I glance up at Campbell. “She said thanks.”

 

SARA

IT IS JUDGE DESALVO'S IDEA to take a field trip of sorts, so that he can talk to Kate. When we all reach the hospital, she is sitting up in bed, absently staring at the TV set that Jesse flicks through with the remote. She is thin, her skin cast yellow, but she's conscious. “The tin man,” Jesse says, “or the scarecrow?”

“Scarecrow would get the stuffing knocked out of him,” Kate says. “Chynna from the WWF, or the Crocodile Hunter?”

Jesse snorts. “The Croc dude. Everyone knows the WWF is fake.” He glances at her. “Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr.?”

“They wouldn't sign the waiver.”

“We're talking Celebrity Boxing on Fox, babe,” Jesse says. “What makes you think they bother with a waiver?”

Kate grins. “One of them would sit down in the ring, and the other wouldn't put his mouthguard in.” This is the moment I walk inside. “Hey, Mom,” she asks, “who'd win on Hypothetical Celebrity Boxing—Marcia or Jan Brady?”

She notices then that I am not alone. As the whole crowd dribbles into the room, her eyes widen, and she pulls the covers up higher. She looks right at Anna, but her sister refuses to meet her eye. “What's going on?”

The judge steps forward, takes my arm. “I know you want to talk to her, Sara, but I need to talk to her.” He walks forward, extending his hand. “Hi, Kate. I'm Judge DeSalvo. I was wondering if I could maybe speak to you for a few minutes? Alone,” he adds, and one by one, everyone else leaves the room.

I am the last to go. I watch Kate lean back against the pillows, suddenly exhausted again. “I had a feeling you'd come,” she tells the judge.

“Why?”

“Because,” Kate says, “it always comes back to me.”

About five years ago a new family bought the house across the street and knocked it down, wanting to rebuild something different. A single bulldozer and a half-dozen waste bins were all it took; in less than a morning this structure, which we'd seen every time we walked outside, was reduced to a pile of rubble. You'd think a house would last forever, but the truth is a strong wind or a wrecking ball can devastate it. The family inside is not so different. Nowadays I can hardly remember what that old house looked like. I walk out the front door and never recall the stretch of months that the gaping lot stood out, conspicuous in its absence, like a lost tooth. It took some time, you know, but the new owners? They did rebuild.

When Judge DeSalvo comes outside, grim and troubled, Campbell, Brian, and I get to our feet. “Tomorrow,” he says. “Closing's at nine A.M.” With a nod to Vern to follow, he walks down the hallway.

“Come on,” Julia tells Campbell. “You're at the mercy of my chaperonage.”

“That's not a real word.” But instead of following her, he walks toward me. “Sara,” he says simply, “I'm sorry.” He gives me one more gift: “You'll take Anna home?”

The minute they leave, Anna turns to me. “I really need to see Kate.” I slide an arm around her. “Of course you can.”

We go inside, just our family, and Anna sits down on the edge of Kate's bed. “Hey,” Kate murmurs, her eyes opening.

Anna shakes her head; it takes a moment for her to find the right words. “I tried,” she says finally, her voice catching like cotton on thorns, as Kate squeezes her hand.

Jesse sits down on the other side. The three of them in one spot; it makes me think of the Christmas card photo we would take each October, balancing them in height order in the wings of a maple tree or on a stone wall, one frozen moment for everyone to remember them by.

“Alf or Mr. Ed,” Jesse says.

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

“You're on.”

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

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

“I guess you have questions,” Kate says.

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

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

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

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

 

THURSDAY

One fire burns out another's burning,

One pain is lessen'd by another's anguish.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet

 

CAMPBELL

IT'S RAINING.

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

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

“You want the shower first?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything inside me goes still. “Fast,” I suggest.

“I hate your apartment.”

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

“You know,” I say. “I hate it, too.”

 

JESSE

IT'S RAINING.

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

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

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

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

 

ANNA

IT'S RAINING.

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

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

 

BRIAN

IT'S RAINING.

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

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

“Andromeda?” she said. “Like the sci-fi book?”

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

 

SARA

IT'S RAINING.

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

“Mrs. Fitzgerald?” the judge prompts.

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

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

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

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

I take a few steps forward. “I know I jump at every sliver of possibility that might cure Kate, but it's all I know how to do. And even if you don't agree with me, even if Kate doesn't agree with me, I want to be the one who says I told you so. Ten years from now, I want to see your children on your lap and in your arms, because that's when you'll understand. I have a sister, so I know—that relationship, it's all about fairness: you want your sibling to have exactly what you have—the same amount of toys, the same number of meatballs on your spaghetti, the same share of love. But being a mother is completely different. You want your child to have more than you ever did. You want to build a fire underneath her and watch her soar. It's bigger than words.” I touch my chest. “And it still all manages to fit very neatly inside here.”

I turn to Judge DeSalvo. "I didn't want to come to court, but I had to. The way the law works, if a petitioner takes action—even if that's your own child—you must have a reaction. And so I was forced to explain, eloquently, why I believe that I know better than Anna what is best for her. When you get down to it, though, explaining what you believe isn't all that easy. If you say that you believe something to be true, you might mean one of two things—that you're still weighing the alternatives, or that you accept it as a fact. I don't logically see how one single word can have contradictory definitions, but emotionally, I completely understand. Because there are times I think what I am doing is right, and there are other times I second-guess myself every step of the way.

“Even if the court found in my favor today, I couldn't force Anna to donate a kidney. No one could. But would I beg her? Would I want to, even if I restrained myself? I don't know, not even after speaking to Kate, and after hearing from Anna. I am not sure what to believe; I never was. I know, indisputably, only two things: that this lawsuit was never really about donating a kidney… but about having choices. And that nobody ever really makes decisions entirely by themselves, not even if a judge gives them the right to do so.”

Finally, I face Campbell. “A long time ago I used to be a lawyer. But I'm not one anymore. I am a mother, and what I've done for the past eighteen years in that capacity is harder than anything I ever had to do in a courtroom. At the beginning of this hearing, Mr. Alexander, you said that none of us is obligated to go into a fire and save someone else from a burning building. But that all changes if you're a parent and the person in that burning building is your child. If that's the case, not only would everyone understand if you ran in to get your child—they'd practically expect it of you.”

I take a deep breath. “In my life, though, that building was on fire, one of my children was in it—and the only opportunity to save her was to send in my other child, because she was the only one who knew the way. Did I know I was taking a risk? Of course. Did I realize it meant maybe losing both of them? Yes. Did I understand that maybe it wasn't fair to ask her to do it? Absolutely. But I also knew that it was the only chance I had to keep both of them. Was it legal? Was it moral? Was it crazy or foolish or cruel? I don't know. But I do know it was right.”

Finished, I sit down at my table. The rain beats against the windows to my right. I wonder if it will ever let up.

 

CAMPBELL

I GET TO MY FEET, look at my notecards, and—like Sara—toss them into the trash. “Like Mrs. Fitzgerald just said, this case isn't about Anna donating a kidney. It isn't about her donating a skin cell, a single blood cell, a rope of DNA. It's about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone. A girl who is thirteen—which is hard, and painful, and beautiful, and difficult, and exhilarating. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out. And ten years from now, in my opinion, I think she's going to be pretty amazing.”