Handle With Care

  Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up.

  I sat between my mother and my father, watching strangers on TV carry in Shaker rockers and dusty paintings and ancient beer tankards and cranberry glass dishes; people and their hidden treasures, who had to be told by experts that they'd taken something incredibly precious for granted.

  Amelia

  I

  tried looking it up on the Internet, but there's nothing that tells you what you're supposed to wear to court if you're a witness. I figured, though, that I definitely wanted the jury to remember me. I mean, they'd had a parade of really boring doctors for the most part; compared to them, I planned to stand out.

  So I spiked my hair, which made it look even darker blue. I wore a bright red sweater and my purple high-top Converses, and my lucky jeans, the ones with the hole in the knee, because I wasn't leaving anything to chance.

  It was pretty ironic, but even last night, my parents hadn't slept in the same bed. Mom was overnight with you at the hospital; Dad and I were back home. Although Guy Booker had said he'd pick me up to go to court, I figured I could hitch a ride with my father and still make it look like I was unhappy to be dragged there. Guy and I had both decided that the longer we could keep my testimony a secret, the better.

  My father, who had already testified, was now allowed to be in the courtroom gallery, which left me alone in the lobby, which was perfect. Shaking, I stood next to a bailiff. 'You okay?' she asked.

  I nodded. 'Butterflies,' I said, and then I heard Guy Booker's voice: 'The defense calls Amelia O'Keefe.'

  I was led inside, but all hell had broken loose. Marin and Guy were up at the bench, arguing; my mother was in tears; my father was standing up, craning his neck around to locate me.

  'You can't call Amelia,' Marin argued.

  Booker shrugged. 'Why not? You're the one who put her on the witness list.'

  'Is there a reason for calling this witness,' Judge Gellar asked, 'beyond simply rubbing the opposing counsel's face in the fact that you can?'

  'Yes, Your Honor,' Booker said. 'Miss O'Keefe has information that this court needs to hear, given the implications of a wrongful birth lawsuit.'

  'All right,' the judge said. 'Bring her in.'

  As I walked toward the front of the courtroom, I could feel everyone's eyes on me. It felt like they were poking holes, and all my confidence was quickly leaking out. As I passed by my mother, I heard her whispering to Marin. 'You promised,' she said. 'You told me it was just a precaution . . .'

  'I had no idea he'd do this,' Marin whispered back. 'Do you have any clue what she's going to say?'

  Then I was in the little wooden cage, like I was a specimen for the jury to scrutinize under a microscope. They brought a Bible over to me and made me swear on it. Guy Booker smiled at me. 'Can you tell us who you are, for the record?'

  'Amelia,' I said, and I had to lick my lips because they were so dry. 'Amelia O'Keefe.'

  'Amelia, where do you live?'

  'Forty-six Stryker Lane in Bankton, New Hampshire.' Could he hear my heart? Because, God, it was like a bongo drum in my chest.

  'How old are you?'

  'Thirteen.'

  'And who are your parents, Amelia?'

  'Charlotte and Sean O'Keefe,' I said. 'Willow's my sister.'

  'Amelia, in your own words, can you explain to the court what this lawsuit is about?'

  I couldn't look at my mother. I pulled my sleeves down, because my scars were burning. 'My mom thinks that Piper should have known earlier that there was going to be a problem with Willow, and should have told her. Because then, she would have had an abortion.'

  'Do you think your mother's telling the truth?'

  'Objection!' Marin shot up so fast it made me jump in the chair.

  'No, I'll allow this,' the judge said. 'You can give your answer, Amelia.'

  I shook my head. 'I know she's not.'

  'How do you know?'

  'Because,' I said, making the words as neat and small as I could, 'I heard her say so.'

  I shouldn't have eavesdropped, but sometimes, that's the only way to find out the truth. And - although I certainly wouldn't admit this out loud - I was feeling sort of protective toward you. You had seemed so down after this latest break and surgery, and when you said Mom wants to get rid of me, it pretty much made me feel like my insides had gone to jelly. We all protected you, in our own ways. Dad blustered around, angry at anything that made life harder for you. Mom, well, she was apparently stupid enough to gamble everything in order to get more for you in the long run. And me, I guess I just lacquered a shell around myself, so that when you got hurt, it was easier to pretend I didn't feel it, too.

  No one's throwing you away, my mother had said, but you were already crying.

  I'm sorry about my leg. I thought if I didn't break anything for a long time, you'd think I was just like any other kid -

  Accidents happen, Willow. Nobody is blaming you.

  You do. You wish you'd never had me. I heard you say it.

  I had held my breath. My mother could tell herself whatever she wanted to help herself get to sleep at night, but she wasn't fooling anyone - especially you.

  Willow, my mother had replied, you listen to me. Everyone makes mistakes . . . including me. We say and we do things we wish we hadn't. But you, you were never a mistake. I would not, in a thousand years - in a million years - have missed out on having you.

  I felt as if I'd been nailed to the wall. If that was true, then everything that had happened in the past year - this lawsuit, losing my friends, watching my parents split - was all for nothing.

  If this was true, then my mother had been lying all along.

  Charlotte

  T

  here's a cost for everything. You might have a beautiful baby girl, but you learn she'll be disabled. You move heaven and earth to make that child happier, but you leave your husband and your other daughter miserable. There is no cosmic scale on which you can weigh your actions; you learn too late what choices ruin the fragile balance.

  As soon as Amelia finished talking, the judge turned to Marin. 'Ms. Gates, your cross-examination?'

  'I don't have any questions for this witness,' she said, 'but I'd like to recall Charlotte O'Keefe to the stand.'

  I stared at her. She hadn't said anything to me via whisper or note, so I stood up cautiously, unsure. Amelia was escorted past me by a bailiff. She was crying. 'I'm sorry,' she mouthed.

  Stiffly, I sat down on the wooden chair. Stick to the message, Marin had said, over and over. But it had gotten harder and harder to remember what that message was.

  'Do you remember that conversation your daughter was just talking about?' Marin asked. Her voice struck like a bullet.

  'Yes.'

  'What were the circumstances?'

  'We'd just brought Willow home from the hospital, after the first day of testimony here. She broke her femur so badly it needed surgery.'

  'Were you upset?'

  'Yes,' I said.

  'Was Willow?'

  'Very.'

  She walked toward me, waiting until I met her eye. And I saw in her the same veiled worry that I'd seen in Amelia when she stepped off that witness stand; in Sean, moments after the courtroom emptied the day before; in you, the night we'd had that very talk - the hidden fear that you might not be good enough for someone you loved. Maybe I felt that, too, and maybe that's why I had started this lawsuit all those months ago - so that when you looked back on your childhood, you didn't blame me for bringing you into a world full of hurt. But love wasn't about sacrifice, and it wasn't about falling short of someone's expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them.

  All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here.

  'When you had that conversation with your daughte
r, Charlotte,' Marin began. 'When you said all those things right in the middle of this lawsuit . . . were you lying?'

  'No.'

  'Then what were you doing?'

  'My best,' I whispered. 'I was only doing my best.'

  Piper

  'T

  hat,' Guy Booker said, leaning closer to me, 'is a slam dunk.' He stood up, buttoning his suit jacket, and faced the jury to begin his closing. 'The plaintiff,' he said, 'is a liar. She says this lawsuit isn't about the money, but even her husband has told you that it is, and can't support her in this lawsuit. She says she wishes that her daughter was never born, but then she tells her daughter the opposite. She tells you that she wished she had the choice to terminate her pregnancy, and she's pointing a finger at Piper Reece, a hardworking physician whose only sin, ladies and gentlemen, was having the poor fortune to become friendly with Charlotte O'Keefe.'

  He spread his palms wide. 'Wrongful birth. Wrongful birth. It just makes you itchy to say it, doesn't it? Yet the plaintiff is saying that her daughter - her beautiful, smart, trivia-loving, beloved little girl - should never have existed. This mother discounts all of those positive traits and says they don't cancel out the fact that her child has osteogenesis imperfecta. Yet you've heard the experts - who admitted that nothing Piper Reece did as a physician was negligent. In fact, as soon as Piper did see a complication during the plaintiff's pregnancy, she did exactly what she was supposed to: she called in someone who could take care of it. And for this, ladies and gentlemen, she's had her life ruined, watched her practice flounder, had her career and her confidence stripped away.'

  He stopped walking in front of the jury box. 'You heard Dr Rosenblad say something we all know: terminating a wanted pregnancy is nobody's first choice. However, when parents are faced with the reality of a fetus who will become a profoundly disabled child, all the choices are bad. If you find in favor of the plaintiff, you're buying into her faulty logic: that you can love your child so much you'd sue a doctor - a close friend - because you believe she should never have been born. You're buying into a system that says obstetricians should determine which disabilities are worth living with and which aren't. And that, my friends, is a dangerous track to walk. What kind of message does that send to people who live daily with handicaps? Which disabilities will be considered "too disabled" to be worthy of a life? Right now, ninety percent of patients whose fetuses are diagnosed with Down syndrome choose to abort, even though there are thousands of people with Down who lead happy, productive existences. What happens when science becomes more advanced? Will patients choose to terminate fetuses with a potential for future heart disease? Or those that might get Bs instead of As? Or those who don't look like supermodels?'

  He began to walk back to the defense table. 'Wrongful birth, ladies and gentlemen, presumes that every baby should be perfect - and Willow O'Keefe isn't. But I'm not perfect, either. Neither is Ms. Gates. Judge Gellar's not even perfect, although I'll admit he's pretty darn close. I'll even hazard a guess that all of you have some flaw, somewhere. So I ask you to think hard while you're considering your verdict,' Booker said. 'Look at this wrongful birth suit, and make the right choice.'

  When he sat down, Marin Gates rose. 'It's ironic that Mr Booker would refer to choices, because that's exactly what Charlotte O'Keefe wasn't given.'

  She stood behind Charlotte, whose head was bowed. 'This case isn't about religion. It's not about abortion. It's not about the rights of the disabled. It's not about whether Charlotte loves her daughter. It's not about any of those issues that the defense would like you to believe. This case is about one thing only: whether Dr Piper Reece provided the appropriate standard of care during Charlotte's pregnancy.'

  After all this time, all these witnesses, I still didn't know the answer to that myself. Even if I had looked at that eighteen-week ultrasound and found cause for concern, I would simply have recommended waiting to see what developed - and the outcome would have been the same. In that, I had saved Charlotte several months of an anxious pregnancy. But did that make me a good obstetrician or a negligent one? Maybe I had made assumptions about Charlotte, simply because I knew her too well, that I wouldn't have made with another patient. Maybe I should have been looking more carefully for signs.

  Maybe if I had, having my best friend sue me would not have come as such a shock.

  'You've heard the evidence. You've heard that there was an anomaly during the eighteen-week ultrasound that suggested follow-up care, that flagged a fetal abnormality. Even if a physician wasn't sure what that abnormality signified, ladies and gentlemen, it was up to her to look more closely and find out. Piper Reece did not do that after the eighteen-week ultrasound, pure and simple. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is negligence.'

  She walked toward me. 'Willow, the child who was born as a result, is going to have special needs her whole life. They're expensive, they're significant, they're painful. They're ongoing, they're cumulative, they're traumatic. They're overwhelming. They're exacerbated by age itself. Your job today is to decide whether Willow will be able to have a better, fuller life, with all the appropriate care she needs. Will she get the surgeries she needs? The adapted vehicles? The specialists' care? Will she continue to get therapy and walking aids - all out-of-pocket expenses for the O'Keefes, which have run them into significant debt? Today, these decisions are in your hands,' Marin said. 'Today you have the opportunity to make a choice . . . the way Charlotte O'Keefe never did.'

  The judge said a few words to the jury, and then everyone began to file out of the courtroom. Rob walked up to the bar that separated the gallery from the front of the court and put his hands on my shoulders. 'You okay?' he asked.

  I nodded. I tried to offer him a smile.

  'Thank you,' I said to Guy Booker.

  He stuffed a pad into his briefcase. 'Don't thank me yet,' he said.

  Charlotte

  'Y

  ou're making me dizzy,' Sean said as I entered the conference room. Amelia was pacing back and forth, her hands speared through her electric hair. As soon as she saw me, she turned.

  'So here's the thing,' she said, talking fast. 'I know you're thinking about killing me, but that wouldn't be the brightest move in a courthouse. I mean, there are cops all over the place, not to mention the fact that Dad's here and he'd be obligated to arrest you--'

  'I'm not going to kill you,' I said.

  She stopped moving. 'No?'

  How had I never noticed before how beautiful Amelia had become? Her eyes, under the fringe of that ridiculous hair, were huge and almond-shaped. Her cheeks were naturally pink. Her mouth was a tiny bow, a purse string holding her opinions tight. I realized that she did not look like me, or like Sean. Mostly, she resembled you.

  'What you did . . . what you said,' I began. 'I know why.'

  'Because I don't want to go to Boston!' Amelia blurted. 'That stupid treatment facility. You're just going to leave me behind there.'

  I glanced at Sean, and then back at her. 'Maybe we shouldn't have made that decision without you.'

  Amelia narrowed her eyes, as if she didn't quite trust what she was hearing.

  'You may be angry at us, but that's not really why you told Guy Booker you'd testify,' I continued. 'I think you did it because you were trying to protect your sister.'

  'Well,' Amelia said. 'Yeah.'

  'How could I be angry at you, then, for doing the same thing I'm trying to do?'

  Amelia threw herself into my arms with the force of a hurricane. 'If we win,' she said, muffled against my chest, 'can I buy a Jet Ski?'

  'No,' Sean and I said simultaneously. He stood up, his hands in his pockets. 'If you win,' he said, 'I was thinking I might move back home for good.'

  'What if I lose?'

  'Well,' Sean said, 'I was still thinking I'd move back home for good.'

  I looked at him over the crown of Amelia's head. 'You drive a hard bargain,' I said, and I smiled.

  On the way to Disney World, during an airp
ort layover, we had eaten in a Mexican restaurant. You had a quesadilla; Amelia had a burrito. I had fish tacos, and Sean had a chimichanga. The mild sauce was too hot for us. Sean convinced me to get a margarita ('It's not like you're the one who'll be flying the plane'). We talked about fried ice cream, which was on the dessert menu and didn't seem possible: wouldn't the ice cream melt when it was put into the deep fryer? We talked about which rides we would go on first in the Magic Kingdom.

  Back then, possibility stretched out in front of us like a red carpet. Back then, we were all focused on what could happen, instead of what had gone wrong. On our way out of the restaurant, the hostess - a girl with pockmarks on her cheeks and a nose stud - gave us each a helium balloon. 'What's the point of this?' Sean said. 'You can't take them on the plane.'

  'Not everything has to have a point,' I replied, looping my arm through his. 'Live a little.'

  Amelia nipped a hole in the neck of her balloon with her teeth and suctioned her lips over it. She took a deep breath, and then looked at us with a dazzling smile. 'Hello, parents,' she said, but her voice was high and reedy, that of a Munchkin, not Amelia's at all.

  'God only knows what's in there--'

  'Duh, Mom,' Amelia trilled. 'Helium.'

  'Me, too,' you said, and Amelia took your balloon and showed you how to breathe it in.

  'I really don't think they should be sucking in helium--'

  'Live a little,' Sean said, grinning, and he nipped a corner of his balloon and sucked in.

  They all started talking at me, their voices a comedy, a bird chorus, a rainbow. 'Do it, Mom,' you said. 'Do it!'

  So I followed suit. The helium burned a little as I swallowed it, one great gulp. I could feel my vocal cords buzzing. 'Maybe this isn't so bad after all,' I peeped.

  We sang 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat.' We recited the Lord's Prayer. And when a man in a business suit stopped Sean to ask if he knew the way to Baggage Claim, Sean took a long drag of his balloon and said, 'Follow the yellow brick road.'

  I cannot remember laughing as much as I did that day, or feeling so liberated. Maybe it was the helium, which made me lighter, made me feel like I could close my eyes and fly to Orlando with or without the plane. Or maybe it was the fact that, no matter what we said to one another, we were not ourselves.