Handle With Care

  'Nothing's wrong,' I said. There I went, fibbing again. I couldn't tell Sean what you'd said to me; I couldn't bear to hear his I told you so. But, my God, was everything that came out of my mouth a lie? 'It's just been a really hard few days.' I folded my arms tightly across my waist. 'Did you, um, did you need me for something?'

  He pointed to the top of the dryer. 'I just came to get my bedding.'

  I knew I should be practicing, but I didn't understand formerly married couples who remained congenial. Yes, it was in the best interests of the children. Yes, it was less stressful. But how could you forget that this particular 'friend' had seen you naked? Had carried your dreams when you were too tired to? You could paint your history over any way you liked, but you'd always see those first few brushstrokes. 'Sean? I'm glad you were here,' I said, honest at last. 'It made everything . . . easier.'

  'Well,' he said simply, 'she's my daughter, too.' He took a step toward me to reach the bedding, and I instinctively backed away. 'Good night,' Sean said.

  'Good night.'

  He started to take the pillows and quilt into his arms and then turned. 'If I were like Willow, and I needed someone to fight hard for me when I couldn't? I'd pick you.'

  'I'm not sure Willow would agree,' I whispered, blinking back tears.

  'Hey,' he said, and I felt his arms come around me. His breath was warm on the crown of my hair. 'What's this?'

  I tilted my face up to his. I wanted to tell him everything - what you had said to me, how tired I was, how much I was wavering - but instead we stared at each other, telegraphing messages that neither one of us was brave enough to speak out loud. And then, slowly, so that we both knew the mistake we were making, we kissed.

  I could not tell you the last time I had kissed Sean, not like this, not beyond a see-you-later-honey peck over the kitchen sink. This was deep and rough and consuming, as if we both meant to be left in ashes when we were through. His beard stubble scraped my chin raw, his teeth bit down, his breath filled my lungs. The room glittered at the edge of my vision, and I broke away for air. 'What are we doing?' I gasped.

  Sean buried his face against my throat. 'Who gives a damn, as long as we keep doing it.'

  Then his hands were slipping underneath my shirt, branding me; my back was touching the humming metal-and-glass fishbowl of the dryer as Sean pushed me against it. I heard the clink of his belt buckle striking the floor and only then realized I had been the one to throw it aside. Wrapping myself around him, I became a vine, thriving, tangled. I threw back my head and burst into bloom.

  It was over as quickly as it had started, and suddenly we were what we had been going into this: two middle-aged people who were lonely enough to be desperate. Sean's jeans were puddled at his ankles; his hands were supporting my thighs. The handle of the dryer was cutting into my back. I let one leg fall to the floor and wrapped a sheet from his pile of bedding around my waist.

  He was blushing, a deep, rootless red. 'I'm sorry.'

  'Are you?' I heard myself say.

  'Maybe not,' he admitted.

  I tried to finger-comb my hair back from the tangle on my face. 'So what do we do now?'

  'Well,' Sean said. 'There's no rewind button.'

  'No.'

  'And you're wearing my top sheet around your . . . you know.'

  I glanced down.

  'And the couch is wicked uncomfortable,' he added.

  'Sean,' I said, smiling. 'Come to bed.'

  I thought that, on the day of the trial, I'd wake up with butterflies in my stomach or a raging headache, but as my eyes slowly adjusted to the sunlight, all I could think was It's going to be okay. It did not hurt that there were muscles in my body that were deliciously sore, that left me rolling over and stretching to hear the music of the shower running, and Sean in it.

  'Mom?'

  I slipped on a robe and ran into your bedroom. 'Wills, how do you feel?'

  'Itchy,' you said. 'And I have to pee.'

  I positioned myself to carry you. You were heavy, but this was a blessing compared with a spica cast, which was the alternative. I helped you lift up your nightgown and settled you on the toilet seat, then waited for you to call me back in so that I could help you wash your hands. I decided that I would buy you a big bottle of Purell on the way home from court today. Which reminded me - you weren't going to be happy about the arrangements I'd made for you. After much debate with Marin about leaving you home while I was in the courtroom, she had let me interview and choose a private pediatric nurse to be with you for the duration of the trial. The astronomical cost, she said, would be deducted from whatever damages we won. It was not ideal, but at least I wouldn't have to worry about your safety. 'Remember Paulette?' I said. 'The nurse?'

  'I don't want her to come . . .'

  'I know, baby, but we don't have a choice. I have to go somewhere important today, and you can't be by yourself.'

  'What about Daddy?'

  'What about me?' Sean said, and he plucked you out of my arms and carried you downstairs as if you didn't weigh anything.

  He was dressed in a coat and tie instead of his uniform. He's coming to court with me, I thought, beginning to smile from the inside out.

  'Amelia's in the shower,' Sean said over his shoulder as he settled you on the couch. 'I told her she has to take the bus in today. Willow--'

  'A nurse is coming to stay with her.'

  He looked down at you. 'Well, that'll be fun.'

  You grimaced. 'Yeah, right.'

  'How about pancakes for breakfast, then, to make it up to you?'

  'Is that all you can cook?' you asked. 'Even I know how to make ramen noodles.'

  'Do you want ramen noodles for breakfast?'

  'No--'

  'Then stop complaining about the pancakes,' Sean said, and then he looked up at me soberly. 'Big day.'

  I nodded and pulled the tie of my robe tighter. 'I can be ready to go in fifteen minutes.'

  Sean stilled in the process of covering you with a blanket. 'I figured we'd take separate cars.' He hesitated. 'I have to meet with Guy Booker beforehand.'

  If he was meeting with Guy Booker, it meant that he was still planning to testify for Piper's defense.

  If he was meeting with Guy Booker, it meant nothing had changed.

  I had been lying to myself, because it was easier than facing the truth: sex wasn't love, and one single, stopgap Band-Aid of a night couldn't fix a broken marriage.

  'Charlotte?' Sean said, and I realized he'd asked me a question. 'Do you want some pancakes?'

  I was sure he did not know that pancakes were among the oldest types of baked goods in America; that in the 1700s, when there had been no baking powder or baking soda, they'd been leavened by beating air into the eggs. I was sure he did not know that pancakes went as far back as the Middle Ages, when they were served on Fat Tuesday, before Lent. That if the griddle was too hot, pancakes would get tough and chewy; if it was too cool, they'd turn out dry and tough.

  I was also sure he did not remember that pancakes were the very first breakfast I ever cooked for him as his wife, when we returned from our honeymoon. I had made the batter and spooned it into a Baggie, cut off a bottom corner, and used it to shape the pancakes. I'd served Sean a stack of hearts.

  'I'm not hungry,' I said.

  Amelia

  S

  o let me tell you why I didn't take the bus that morning: no one had bothered to check outside the front door, and it wasn't until Paulette the nurse arrived and totally freaked out when she had to beat off an army of photographers and reporters that we realized how many people had gathered to snap the coveted picture of my parents leaving for court.

  'Amelia,' my father said tightly, 'in the car. Now!'

  For once, I just did what he said.

  That would have been bad enough, but some of them followed us to my school. I kept an eye on them in the passenger mirror. 'Isn't this how Princess Diana died?'

  My father hadn't spoken a word, but his ja
w was set so tight I thought he might crack a tooth. At a red light, he faced me. 'I know it's going to be hard, but you have to pretend this is any other normal day.'

  I know what you're thinking: this is the point where Amelia inserts a really snarky, inappropriate comment, like That's what they said about 9/11, too, but I just didn't have one in me. Instead, I found myself shaking so hard I had to slip my hands underneath my thighs. 'I don't know what normal is anymore,' I heard myself say, in the tiniest voice ever.

  My father reached out and brushed my hair off my face. 'When this is all over,' he said, 'do you think you might like to live with me?'

  Those words, they made my heart pump triple time. Someone wanted me; someone was choosing me. But I also sort of felt like throwing up. It was a nice fantasy, but if we were being totally realistic, what court would grant custody to a man who wasn't even related to me by blood? That meant I'd be stuck with my mother, who would know by then that she was my second choice. And besides, what about you? If I lived alone with Dad, maybe I'd finally get some attention, but I'd also be leaving you behind. Would you hate me for it?

  When I didn't answer and the light turned green, my father started driving again. 'You can think about it,' he said, but I could tell he was a little bit hurt.

  Five minutes later, we were at the circular driveway of my school. 'Are the reporters going to follow me in?'

  'They're not allowed,' my father said.

  'Well.' I pulled my backpack onto my lap. It weighed thirty-three pounds, which was a third of my body weight. I knew this for a fact because last week the school nurse had a scale set up where you could weigh your bag and yourself, since kids my age weren't supposed to be hauling around bags that were too heavy. If you divided your backpack weight by your body weight and got more than 15 percent, you were going to wind up with scoliosis or rickets or hives or God knew what. Everyone's pack had been too heavy, but that didn't keep teachers from assigning the same amount of homework.

  'Um, good luck today,' I said.

  'Do you want me to come in and talk to the guidance counselor or the principal? Tell them you might need extra attention today . . .?'

  That was the last thing I needed - to stand out like even more of a sore thumb. 'I'm fine,' I said, and I opened the truck door.

  The cars peeled off after my dad's truck, which made it a little easier for me to breathe. At least that's what I thought, until I heard someone call my name. 'Amelia,' a woman said, 'how do you feel about this lawsuit?'

  Behind her was a man with a TV camera on his shoulder. Some other kids walking into the school threw their arms around me, as if I were their friend. 'Dude!' one of them said. 'Can you do this on TV?' He held up his middle finger.

  Another journalist materialized from behind the bushes on my left. 'Does your sister talk to you about how she feels, knowing her mother's suing for wrongful birth?'

  Was this a family decision?

  Are you going to testify?

  Until I heard that, I'd forgotten: my name was on some stupid list, just in case. My mother and Marin had said that I'd probably never testify, that it was just a precaution, but I didn't like being on lists. It made me feel like someone was counting on me, and what if I let them down?

  Why weren't they following Emma? She went to this school, too. But I already knew the answer: in their eyes, in everyone's eyes, Piper was the victim. I was the one related to the vampire who'd decided to suck her best friend dry.

  'Amelia?'

  Over here, Amelia . . .

  Amelia!

  'Leave me alone!' I shouted. I covered my ears with my hands and shoved my way into the school, blindly pushing past kids kneeling at their lockers and teachers navigating with their mugs of coffee and couples making out as if they wouldn't see each other for years, instead of just the next forty-five minutes of class. I turned in to the first doorway I could find - a teachers' bathroom - and locked myself inside. I stared at the clean porcelain rim of the toilet.

  I knew the word for what I was doing. They showed us movies about it in health class; they called it an eating disorder. But that was completely wrong: when I did it, everything fell into place.

  For example, when I did it, hating myself made perfect sense. Who wouldn't hate someone who ate like Jabba the Hutt and then vomited it all up again? Someone who went to all the trouble to get rid of the food inside her but was still just as chubby as ever? And I understood that whatever I was doing wasn't nearly as bad as the girl in my school who was anorexic. Her limbs looked like toothpick and sinew; no one in their right mind would ever confuse me with her. I wasn't doing this because I looked in the mirror and saw a fat girl even though I was skinny - I was fat. I couldn't even starve myself the right way, apparently.

  But I had sworn that I'd stop. I had sworn that I'd stop making myself sick, in return for a family that stayed together.

  You promised, I told myself.

  Less than twelve hours ago.

  But suddenly there I was, sticking my finger down my throat, throwing up, waiting for the relief that always came.

  Except this time, it didn't.

  Piper

  I

  learned from Charlotte that baking is all about chemistry. Leavening happens biologically, chemically, or mechanically, and creates steam or gases that make the mixture rise. The key to great baked goods is to pick the right leavening agent for the batter or dough, so that bread has a smooth texture, popovers pop, meringue foams, and souffles rise.

  This, Charlotte said to me one day, while I was helping her bake a birthday cake for Amelia, is why baking works. She wrote on a napkin: KC4H5O6 + NaHCO3 - CO2 | + KNaC4H4O6 + H2O

  I got a B-in Orgo, I told her.

  Cream of tartar plus sodium bicarbonate gives you carbon dioxide gas and potassium sodium tartrate and water, she said.

  Show-off, I replied.

  I'm only saying it's not as simple as beating eggs and flour together, Charlotte said. I'm trying to make this a teachable moment here.

  Pass me the damn vanilla extract, I said. Do they really teach that in culinary school?

  They don't just hand over scalpels to med students, do they? You have to learn why you're doing what you're doing first.

  I shrugged. I bet Betty Crocker wouldn't know a scientific equation if it flew out of her oven.

  Charlotte began to mix the batter. She knew it in principle: one ingredient in a bowl is a start. But two ingredients in a bowl, well, that's a whole story.

  Here's what Charlotte didn't mention: that sometimes even the most careful baker can make a mistake. That the balance between the acid and the soda might be off, the ingredients not mixed, the salts trapped behind.

  That you'd be left with a bitter taste in your mouth.

  On the morning of the trial, I stayed in the shower for a very long time, letting the water strike my back like a punishment. Here it was: the moment I would face Charlotte in court.

  I had forgotten the sound of her voice.

  Besides the obvious difference, there was not much distinction between losing a best friend and losing a lover: it was all about intimacy. One moment, you had someone to share your biggest triumphs and fatal flaws with; the next minute, you had to keep them bottled inside. One moment, you'd start to call her to tell her a snippet of news or to vent about your awful day before realizing you did not have that right anymore; the next, you could not remember the digits of her phone number.

  Once the shock had worn off when I was served, I had gotten furious. Who the hell did Charlotte think she was, ruining my life in order to bolster her own? Anger, though, is too fierce a flame to last for long, and when it burned out, I was left numb and wondering. Would she get what she wanted from this? And what did she want? Revenge? Money? Peace of mind?

  Sometimes I woke up with words weighing down my tongue like stones, left over from a recurring nightmare where Charlotte and I met face-to-face. I had a thousand things to say to her, and not one of them ever came out.
When I looked at her, to see why she wasn't speaking, either, I noticed that her mouth had been sewn shut.

  I had not gone back to work. The one time I'd tried, I had been shaking so hard when I got to the front door that I never went inside. I knew of other doctors who had been sued for malpractice and went back to their routines, but this lawsuit went beyond the question of whether or not I could have diagnosed osteogenesis imperfecta in utero. It wasn't skeletal breaks I had not seen in advance but rather the wishes of a best friend whose mind I'd thought I knew inside out. If I had not been able to read Charlotte correctly, how could I trust myself to understand the needs of patients who were virtual strangers?

  I had wondered for the first time about the terminology of running your own office as a doctor. It was called a practice. But shouldn't we have gotten it right by the time we opened one?

  We were, of course, taking a huge financial hit. I had promised Rob that I would go back to work by the end of the month, whether or not the trial was over. I had not specified, however, what sort of work I'd go back to. I still could not imagine myself shepherding a routine pregnancy. What about pregnancy was routine?

  In the course of preparing with Guy Booker, I had gone back over my notes and my memories a thousand times. I almost believed him when he said that no physician would be blamed for not diagnosing OI at the eighteen-week ultrasound; that even if I had an inkling about it, the recommended course of action would have been to wait several weeks to see if the fetus was Type II or Type III. I had behaved responsibly as a doctor.

  I just hadn't behaved responsibly as a friend.

  I should have been looking more closely. I should have pored over Charlotte's records with the same thoroughness with which I would have pored over my own, had I been the patient. Even if I was in the right in a courtroom, I had failed her as a friend. And in a roundabout way, that was how I'd failed her as a doctor, too - I should have declined when she asked me to treat her in my practice. I should have known that somehow, some way, the relationship we had outside the examination room would color the relationship we had inside it.

  The water in the shower was running cold now; I turned it off and wrapped a towel around myself. Guy Booker had given me very specific instructions on what I should wear today: no business suits, nothing black, hair loose around my face. I'd bought a twinset at T.J. Maxx because I never wore them but Guy said that it would be perfect. The idea was to look like an ordinary mom, a person any woman on the jury might identify with.