Handle With Care

  'I want names,' I said. 'I want to sue, and I want to do it fast. I want to go after someone at Disney World, someone at the hospital, and someone at DCF. I want people's jobs, and I want money out of this to make up for the hell we went through.'

  By the time I finished, my face felt hot. I couldn't look at your mother; I didn't want to see her face after what I'd said.

  Ramirez nodded. 'The type of case you're suggesting is very expensive, Sergeant O'Keefe. Any lawyer that takes it on would do a cost-benefit analysis first, and I can tell you right away that, even though you're seeking a money judgment, you're not going to get one.'

  'But those checks in the waiting room . . .'

  'Were for cases where the plaintiff had a valid complaint. From what you've described to us, the people who worked at Disney World and the hospital and DCF were just doing their jobs. Doctors have a legal responsibility to report suspicions of child abuse. Without the letter from your hometown doctor, the police had probable cause to make the arrest in the state of Florida. DCF has an obligation to protect children, particularly when the child in question is too young to give a detailed account of her own health issues. As an officer of the law, I'm sure if you step back and remove the emotion from the facts here, you'll see that, once the healthcare information was received from New Hampshire, your kids were immediately turned over to you; you and your wife were released . . . sure, it made you feel awful. But embarrassment isn't a just cause of action.'

  'What about emotional damages?' I blustered. 'Do you have any idea what that was like for me? For my kids?'

  'I'm sure it was nothing compared to the emotional burden of living day in and day out with a child who has these particular health problems,' Ramirez said, and beside me, Charlotte lifted her gaze to his. The lawyer smiled sympathetically at her. 'I mean, it must be quite challenging.' He leaned forward, frowning a little. 'I don't know much about - what's it called? Osteo . . .'

  'Osteogenesis imperfecta,' Charlotte said softly.

  'How many breaks has Willow had?'

  'Fifty-two,' you said. 'And did you know that the only bone that hasn't been broken by a person in a skiing accident yet is one in the inner ear?'

  'I did not,' Ramirez said, taken aback. 'She's something else, huh?'

  I shrugged. You were Willow, pure and simple. There was nobody else like you. I knew it the moment I first held you, wrapped in foam so that you wouldn't get hurt in my arms: your soul was stronger than your body, and in spite of what the doctors told me over and over, I always believed that was the reason for the breaks. What ordinary skeleton could contain a heart as big as the whole world?

  Marin Gates cleared her throat. 'How was Willow conceived?'

  'Ugh,' Amelia said - until then, I'd forgotten she was with us - 'that's totally gross.' I shook my head at her, a warning.

  'We had a hard time,' Charlotte said. 'We were about to try in vitro when I found out I was pregnant.'

  'Grosser,' Amelia said.

  'Amelia!' I passed you over to your mother and pulled your sister up by the hand. 'You can wait outside,' I said under my breath.

  The secretary looked at us as we entered the waiting room again, but she didn't say anything. 'What are you going to talk about next?' Amelia challenged. 'Your personal experience with hemorrhoids?'

  'That's enough,' I said, trying hard not to lose my temper in front of the secretary. 'We'll be out soon.'

  While I headed back down the hall, I heard the secretary's high heels clicking as she walked toward Amelia. 'Want a cup of cocoa?' she asked.

  When I entered the conference room again, Charlotte was still talking. '. . . but I was thirty-eight years old,' she said. 'You know what they write on your charts, when you're thirty-eight? "Geriatric pregnancy." I was worried about having a Down syndrome child - I never had even heard of OI.'

  'Did you have amnio?'

  'Amnio won't tell you automatically that a fetus has OI; you'd have to be looking for it because it's already shown up in your family. But Willow's case was a spontaneous mutation. It wasn't inherited.'

  'So you didn't know before Willow was born that she had OI?' Ramirez asked.

  'We knew when Charlotte's second ultrasound showed a bunch of broken bones,' I answered. 'Look, are we done here? If you don't want this case, I'm sure I can find--'

  'Do you remember that weird thing at the first ultrasound?' Charlotte said, turning to me.

  'What weird thing?' Ramirez asked.

  'The tech thought the picture of the brain looked too clear.'

  'There's no such thing as too clear,' I said.

  Ramirez and his associate exchanged a glance. 'And what did your OB say?'

  'Nothing.' Charlotte shrugged. 'No one even mentioned OI until we did another ultrasound at twenty-seven weeks, and saw all the fractures.'

  Ramirez turned to Marin Gates. 'See if it's ever diagnosed in utero that early,' he ordered, and then he turned back to Charlotte. 'Would you be willing to release your medical records to us? We'll have to do some research on whether or not you have a cause of action--'

  'I thought we didn't have a lawsuit,' I said.

  'You might, Officer O'Keefe.' Robert Ramirez looked at you as if he was memorizing your features. 'Just not the one you thought.'

  Marin

  T

  welve years ago I was a senior in college, going nowhere fast, when I sat down at the kitchen table and had a talk with my mother (more on that later). 'I don't know what I want to be,' I said.

  This was hugely ironic for me, because I didn't really know what I had been, either. Since I was five, I've known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one's own origins.

  'What do you like to do?' my mother had asked, taking a sip of her coffee. She took it black; I took mine light and sweet. It was one of thousands of discrepancies between us that always led to unspoken questions: Had my birth mother taken her coffee light and sweet, too? Did she have my blue eyes, my high cheekbones, my left-handedness?

  'I like to read,' I said, and then I rolled my eyes. 'This is stupid.'

  'And you like to argue.'

  I smirked at her.

  'Reading. Arguing. Honey,' my mother said, brightening, 'you were meant to be a lawyer.'

  Fast-forward nine years: I'd been called back to the doctor's office because of an abnormal Pap smear. While I was waiting for the gynecologist to come in, the life I didn't have flashed before my eyes: the kids I'd put off having because I was too busy in law school and building my career; the men I hadn't dated because I wanted to make law review instead; the house in the country I didn't buy because I worked such long hours I never would have been able to enjoy that expansive teak deck, that mountain view. 'Let's go over your family medical history,' my doctor said, and I gave my standard answer: 'I'm adopted; I don't know my family medical history.'

  Even though I turned out to be fine - the abnormal results were a lab error - I think that was the day I decided to search for my birth parents.

  I know what you're thinking: wasn't I happy with my adoptive parents? Well, the answer was yes - which is why I hadn't even entertained the thought of searching until I was thirty-one. I'd always been happy and grateful that I got to grow up with my family; I didn't need or want a new one. And the very last thing I wanted to do was break their hearts by telling them I was mounting a search.

  But even though I knew my whole life that my adoptive parents desperately wanted me, somewhere in my mind, I knew that my birth parents didn't. My mom had given me the party line about them being too young and not ready to have a family - and logically I understood that - but emotionally, I felt like I'd been tossed aside. I guess I wanted to know why. So after a talk with my adoptive parents - one during which my mother cried the whole time she promised to help me - I tentatively waded into the search that I'd been toying with for the past six months.

  Being adopted felt like reading a book that had the first chapter ripped out. Y
ou might be enjoying the plot and the characters, but you'd probably also like to read that first line, too. However, when you took the book back to the store to say that the first chapter was missing, they told you they couldn't sell you a replacement copy that was intact. What if you read that first chapter and realized you hated the book, and posted a nasty review on Amazon? What if you hurt the author's feelings? Better just to stick with your partial copy and enjoy the rest of the story.

  Adoption records weren't open - not even for someone like me, who knew how to pull strings legally. Which meant that every step was Herculean, and that there were far more failures than successes. I'd spent the first three months of my search paying a private investigator over six hundred dollars to tell me that he had turned up absolutely nothing. That, I figured, I could have done myself for free.

  The problem was that my real job kept interfering.

  As soon as we finished showing the O'Keefes out of the law office, I rounded on my boss. 'For the record? This kind of lawsuit is completely unpalatable to me,' I said.

  'Will you still say that,' Bob mused, 'if we wind up with the biggest wrongful birth payout in New Hampshire?'

  'You don't know that--'

  He shrugged. 'Depends on what her medical records turn up.'

  A wrongful birth lawsuit implies that, if the mother had known during her pregnancy that her child was going to be significantly impaired, she would have chosen to abort the fetus. It places the onus of responsibility for the child's subsequent disability on the ob-gyn. From a plaintiff's standpoint, it's a medical malpractice suit. For the defense, it becomes a morality question: who has the right to decide what kind of life is too limited to be worth living?

  Many states had banned wrongful birth suits. New Hampshire wasn't one of them. There had been several settlements for the parents of children who'd been born with spina bifida or cystic fibrosis or, in one case, a boy who was profoundly retarded and wheelchair-bound due to a genetic abnormality - even though the illness had never been diagnosed before, much less noticed in utero. In New Hampshire, parents were responsible for the care of disabled children their whole lives - not just till age eighteen - which was as good a reason as any to seek damages. There was no question Willow O'Keefe was a sad story, with her enormous body cast, but she'd smiled and answered questions when the father left the room and Bob chatted her up. To put it bluntly: she was cute and bright and articulate - and therefore a much tougher hardship case to sell to a jury.

  'If Charlotte O'Keefe's provider didn't meet the standard of care,' Bob said, 'then she should be held liable, so this doesn't happen again.'

  I rolled my eyes. 'You can't play the conscience card when you stand to make a few million, Bob. And it's a slippery slope - if an OB decides a kid with brittle bones shouldn't be born, what's next? A prenatal test for low IQ, so you can scrap the fetus that won't grow up and get into Harvard?'

  He clapped me on the back. 'You know, it's nice to see someone so passionate. Personally, whenever people start talking about curing too many things with science, I'm always glad bioethics wasn't an issue during the time polio, TB, and yellow fever were running rampant.' We were walking toward our individual offices, but he suddenly stopped and turned to me. 'Are you a neo-Nazi?'

  'What?'

  'I didn't think so. But if we were asked to defend a client who was a neo-Nazi in a criminal suit, could you do your job - even if you found his beliefs disgusting?'

  'Of course, and that's a question for a first-year law student,' I said immediately. 'But this is totally different.'

  Bob shook his head. 'That's the thing, Marin,' he replied. 'It really isn't.'

  I waited until he'd closed the door to his office and then let out a groan of frustration. Inside my office, I kicked off my heels and stomped to my desk to sit down. Briony had brought in my mail, neatly bound in an elastic band. I sifted through it, sorting envelopes into case-by-case piles, until I came to one that had an unfamiliar return address.

  A month ago, after I'd fired the private investigator, I had sent a letter to the court in Hillsborough County to get my adoption decree. For ten dollars, you could get a copy of the original document. Armed with that, and the fact that I had been born at St. Joseph Hospital in Nashua, I planned to do some legwork and ferret out the first name of my birth mother. I was hoping for a court intern who might not know what he or she was doing and would forget to white out my birth name on the document. Instead, I wound up with a clerk named Maisie Donovan, who'd worked at the county court since the dinosaurs died out - and who had sent me the envelope I now held in my shaking hands.

  COUNTY COURT OF HILLSBOROUGH, NEW

  HAMPSHIRE IN RE: ADOPTION OF BABY GIRL

  FINAL DECREE

  AND NOW, July 28, 1973, upon consideration of the within Petition and of the hearing and thereon, and the Court having made an investigation to verify the statements of the Petition and other facts to give the Court full knowledge as to the desirability of the proposed adoption; The Court, being satisfied, finds that the statements made in the Petition are true, and that the welfare of the person proposed to be adopted will be promoted by this adoption; and directs that BABY GIRL, the person proposed to be adopted, shall have all the rights of a child and heir of Arthur William Gates and Yvonne Sugarman Gates, and shall be subject to all the duties of such child; and shall hereafter assume the name of MARIN ELIZABETH GATES.

  I read it a second time, and a third. I stared at the judge's signature - Alfred something-or-other. For ten dollars I had been given the earth-shattering information that 1. I am female

  2. My name is Marin Elizabeth Gates

  Well, what had I expected? A Hallmark card from my birth mother and an invitation to this year's family reunion? With a sigh, I opened my filing cabinet and dropped the decree into the folder that I'd marked PERSONAL. Then I took out a new manila folder and wrote O'KEEFE across the tab. 'Wrongful birth,' I murmured out loud, just to test the words on my tongue; they were (no surprise) bitter as coffee grains. I tried to turn my attention to a lawsuit with the thinly veiled message that there are some children who should never be born, and winged a silent thank-you to my birth mother for not feeling the same way.

  Piper

  T

  echnically, I was your godmother. Apparently, that meant that I was responsible for your religious education, which was sort of a colossal joke since I never set foot in a church (blame that healthy fear of the roof bursting into flames), while your mother rarely missed a weekend Mass. I liked to think of my role, instead, as the fairy-tale version. That one day, with or without the help of mice wearing tiny overalls, I'd make you feel like a princess.

  To that end, I rarely showed up to your house empty-handed. Charlotte said I was spoiling you, but I wasn't draping you in diamonds or giving you the keys to a Hummer. I brought magic tricks, candy bars, kiddie videotapes that Emma had outgrown. Even when I visited directly from a stint at the hospital, I'd improvise: a rubber glove, knotted into a balloon. A hair net from the OR. 'The day you bring her a speculum,' Charlotte used to say, 'your welcome is officially rescinded.'

  'Hello,' I yelled as I walked through the front door. To be honest, I can't remember a time I ever knocked. 'Five minutes,' I said, as Emma tore up the stairs to find Amelia. 'Don't even take your coat off.' I wandered through the hallway into Charlotte's living room, where you were propped up in your spica cast, reading.

  'Piper!' you said, and your face lit up.

  Sometimes, when I looked at you, I didn't see the compromised twist of your bones or the short stature that came part and parcel with your illness. Instead, I remembered your mother crying when she told me that she had failed to get pregnant yet another month; I remembered her taking the Doptone out of my ears at an office visit so that she could listen to your hummingbird heartbeat, too.

  I sat down beside you on the couch and took your gift du jour out of my coat pocket. It was a beach ball - believe me, it wasn't easy finding one of tho
se in February. 'We didn't get to go to the beach,' you said. 'I fell down.'

  'Ah, but this isn't just a beach ball,' I corrected, and I inflated it until it was as firm and round as the belly of a woman in her ninth month. Then I pushed it between your knees, the ball wedged tight against the plaster, and began to strike the top of it with an open palm. 'This,' I said, 'is a bongo drum.'

  You laughed, and began to smack the plastic surface, too. The sound brought Charlotte into the room. 'You look like hell,' I said. 'When was the last time you slept?'

  'Gee, Piper, it's really great to see you, too . . .'

  'Is Amelia ready?'

  'For what?'

  'Skating?'

  She smacked her forehead. 'I totally forgot. Amelia!' she yelled, and then to me: 'We just got home from the lawyer's.'

  'And? Is Sean still on a rampage to sue the world?'

  Instead of answering, she rapped her hand against the beach ball. She didn't like it when I ragged on Sean. Your mother was my best friend in the world, but your father could drive me crazy. He got an idea in his head, and that was the end of that - you couldn't budge him. The world was utterly black-and-white for Sean, and I guess I've always been the kind of person who prefers a splash of color.

  'Guess what, Piper,' you interrupted. 'I went skating, too.'

  I glanced at Charlotte, who nodded. She was usually terrified about the pond in the backyard and its constant temptation; I couldn't wait to hear the details of this story. 'I suppose if you forgot about skating, you forgot about the bake sale, too?'

  Charlotte winced. 'What did you make?'

  'I made brownies,' I told her. 'In the shape of skates. With frosting for the laces and blades. Get it? Ice skates with frosting?'

  'You made brownies?' Charlotte said, and I followed her as she headed toward the kitchen.

  'From scratch. The rest of the moms already blacklisted me because I missed the spring show for a medical conference. I'm trying to atone.'

  'So you whipped these up when? While you were stitching an episiotomy? After being on call for thirty-six hours?' Charlotte opened her pantry and rummaged through the shelves, finally grabbing a package of Chips Ahoy! and spilling them onto a serving platter. 'Honestly, Piper, do you always have to be so damn perfect ?'